Can Educating Women in the Liberal Arts Lift Asia’s Communities Out of Poverty?

September 3, 2019       By KARIN FISCHER

Chittagong, Bangladesh

It is a Saturday morning, but more than 100 students from the Asian University for Women have crowded into a top-floor common room. The occasion for giving up a rare morning of leisure? Poster-fair presentations from the past summer’s research projects.

Knots of women gather around the two-dozen posters, often hand-lettered and tacked to cork boards. The presenters give practiced speeches about their findings. One group examined birth-control use in refugee camps in southern Bangladesh. Another found that belief in traditional healers delayed Indigeneous tribes from seeking medical care.

Their classmates pepper them with questions: Is it religious beliefs or pressure from their husbands that keep Rohingya refugee women from using condoms? Can doctors build trust if they don’t speak the tribal dialect? The swell of conversation fills the narrow room.

Not long ago, most of these students thought they’d have little chance at higher education. They are the daughters of poor families, factory workers, refugees themselves. Here, they were chatting excitedly about scientific protocols and a second round of research next summer.

The exporting of the American model of education abroad has mostly been an elite enterprise, with campuses in monyed countries, like Abu Dhabi and Singapore, serving select students. The Asian University for Women is different. Built on the liberal-arts tradition of top American women’s colleges like Smith and Wellesley, the Bangladeshi-based institution looks modest from the outside, housed in a handful of narrow, nondescript buildings. But it is driven by an ambitious idea: that educating women across Asia is key to lifting the region out of poverty and to resolving the deep-seated religious, ethnic, and cultural conflicts that trouble it. In many ways, the poster fair is the embodiment of that vision.

AUW, which has applied for accreditation from the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, has attracted high-profile backers, including Bill and Melinda Gates, the Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus, and Cherie Blair, wife of the former British prime minister and the university’s current chancellor. But its work – taking in students with little formal schooling and minimal English and turning them into participants in sophisticated academic debates in a few short years – is intensive. Nearly all the institution’s 800 students, who come from nearly 20 countries, from Afghanistan to Vietnam, are on full scholarship, a financial burden that threatens the university’s long-term sustainability.

And even many who believe in AUW’s vision have questioned whether Bangladesh, a poor country with undependable infrastructure, is the place to locate a world-class university.

Kamal Ahmad, AUW’s founder, is often asked, Why start a liberal-arts college rather than support vocational or professional training that would allow graduates to secure higher-paying jobs? After all, even in the United States, the birthplace of the liberal arts, many people question its real-world value. At a time when the needs of low-income students are drawing more attention, elected officials and grantmakers have joined employers and parents in pushing for narrower paths and more-pragmatic offerings, elevating majors like business above the arts and sciences on many American campuses.

But Ahmad argues that an education grounded in critical thinking and inquiry is not only practical but especially powerful in the AUW context, where the curriculum is informed by the students’ profound life experiences. The liberal-arts tradition, he says, “helps women take charge of their lives, with their mind their instrument of power.”

Where Schooling Was Rare

I can’t do it, Sadaf Samani told her math professor, crying. I just can’t.

Sadaf had come to AUW from Afghanistan with an ambition to be among the best students. But on her very first math exam, she had done poorly, solving barely half of the test’s 50 problems correctly. Despairing, she asked to be reassigned to a more-remedial class.

In her first few weeks in college, Sadaf had come to understand how much her education up to that point had failed her. At AUW, Afghan students in particular struggle to meet the math requirements – to start full undergraduate study, students must have completed calculus – a reflection of the weak preparation they receive back home.

Educational reform in Afghanistan once showed promise. Institutions like Kabul University attracted students from neighboring countries, and men and women studied together.

But beginning with the Soviet invasion in 1979, successive wars robbed generations of young Afghans of an education. Schools were destroyed, universities were shuttered, and many teachers fled. Under the Taliban, almost all education was prohibited for women and girls. Even today, the United Nations Children’s Fund estimates that 40 percent of school-age boys in Afghanistan and two-thirds of girls are not in school. Just three in 10 Afghan adults can read and write, one of the lowest literacy rates in the world.

The country remains unstable. While Sadaf’s hometown of Herat, near Iran in the west, is relatively secure, in much of Afghanistan the trip to and from school can be a dangerous one.

For those who do go to school, the quality is often poor. Classrooms are so overcrowded that students attend in shifts, cutting short their lessons. Teacher training is subpar and salaries low. To make ends meet, some instructors steal textbooks from schools and sell them to their students. Without money to pay for books that should have been free, children from poor families cannot keep up with their studies.

“People, if they don’t have enough money for eating, how can they send their children to school or to university?” Sadaf says. “They just focus on staying alive.”

Many don’t see the point of education. Once, Sadaf was sent to buy bread from a baker who gave her the loaf wrapped in what she recognized as pages from a novel written by one of her favorite authors, Paulo Coelho.

Sadaf’s family was different. Her parents raised her, her younger brother, and her two younger sisters to love learning. In the early morning, before the school day began, she took English lessons. In her free time, she tutored dropouts, some of them years her senior.

Sadaf’s father, a shop owner, and her mother, who works for an NGO, wanted her to be able to go abroad to get a better education, but to afford it, she had to win a scholarship. When she found information about AUW on Facebook, it seemed that she would realize her dream.

Now that she was there, she was falling short. But even though she pleaded, her professor refused to move her to an easier class. It’s OK, he told her. You can do this. 

Sadaf felt his resolve rubbing off on her. She took the time she might have spent reading and studied, doing hundreds, even thousands, of practice math problems. She went to a tutoring center, turned to a Chinese friend for late-night assistance, and visited professors’ office hours. When she made mistakes, they encouraged her, unlike in Afghanistan, where a teacher once reprimanded her with a slap for asking too many questions.

Being at AUW, surrounded by other bright, young women, was nothing like Afghanistan, where just five percent of women go on to college.

Development experts agree that lack of education – and specifically, the lack of educated women – exacerbates the very problems that a poor country like Afghanistan faces. A woman with even some education is likely to marry later, use contraception, and send her own kids to school. The chance that she will work rises, while the risk that her children will die young falls. Countries that have moved up the United Nations’ human-development index, a measure that gauges social and economic growth, are those with increasing numbers of female college graduates; the U.N. has made educating women one of its sustainable development goals.

For many decades, though, education efforts in the developing world focused on basic schooling. Only in recent years have development experts begun to recognize the broader societal benefits that come from having greater numbers of highly educated citizens. It’s this very idea, of education’s power for societal transformation, that drives AUW.

“Educating women is not educating one girl,” says Nirmala Rao, the university’s vice chancellor, “it’s educating a whole family. It’s educating a community, a nation.”

Still, in Afghanistan, social and cultural norms are additional headwinds that keep women from pursuing a degree. It remains a conservative country. When Sadaf goes out in public, people often stare disapprovingly because she covers her head but leaves her face, with her rosebud mouth and liquid brown eyes, unveiled. By her age, 20, more than a third of Afghan women are already married.

Sadaf, in fact, has had a marriage proposal, from a cousin who lives in Canada. He says he loves and respects her, but she worries that if she were to become a wife, it would derail her education.

When she studies, it is not just for herself but for her younger sisters. It is for Afghanistan. If she can do well at AUW, then she can win entrance to a good graduate school; a quarter of AUW graduates go on to earn advanced degrees. Then, she vows, she will return to Afghanistan, join the Ministry of Education, and work to reform its educational system and change attitudes toward learning.

“An illiterate mother grows children without knowledge,” Sadaf says. “It is my goal, my great ambition, that my son or my daughter will be able to study in a better university in Afghanistan, in our own country.”

In Bangladesh, Sadaf puts her head down and does her schoolwork, drilling math for as much as three hours a night. At the end of the year, she earns the class’s highest marks.

Finding Her Own Path

Rohinee Soomit’s parents wanted her to get an education, but the path they envisioned for their only daughter was a narrow one: She would go to medical school and become a doctor.

In status-obsessed Bangladesh, there is no more desirable career than doctor or engineer, so for more than a year, every spare minute Rohinee had was spent studying for her medical school entrance exam. (In Bangladesh, students study medicine directly out of high school.) When the results came back, however, her scores were not good enough to earn her a rare spot at one of the country’s public medical schools.

Rohinee’s lower middle-class parents – her mother works in an office, while her father has a small printing business – could not afford tuition at a private medical college. There was no plan B. So she found a job training women to go to Hong Kong as domestic help, tutoring them in basic English and Cantonese. This was it, she thought. This was her life.

Then Rohinee heard about AUW from a family friend. She didn’t know much about the liberal arts, but the university offered large scholarships to promising students. She had little to lose, so she applied.

The liberal arts are not a draw in a part of the world where most parents think the way that Rohinee’s do. Higher education in countries like Bangladesh and neighboring India are in many ways a vestige of British colonial rule: narrow, technocratic, with students studying a single subject.

Ahmad, AUW’s founder, grew up in Bangladesh, the son and grandson of academics. Trained as a lawyer, he became interested in international-development work while still an undergraduate at Harvard, where he started a national network of student groups focused on such projects. When Ahmad first began to share his idea for AUW, he met a lot of resistance. Why not start a university with more professionally focused degrees, like engineering or business, he was asked. Or why open a higher-ed institution at all? These are poor girls, people told him, it’s enough to just teach them a trade.

Ahmad was undeterred. “It’s nothing but prejudice to think that poor people can’t aspire to a higher education,” he says. There have been plenty of projects that have sought to give women in countries like Bangladesh a basic education or a skill that allows them to provide for their families. But these efforts haven’t gone far enough in transforming women’s lives, individually or collectively, Ahmad believes, and too often, they leave women an illness or a single setback from economic insecurity.

The liberal arts’ impact can be more far-reaching, Ahmad argues, because it nurtures broader aptitudes. “We’re saying, Yes, you have dexterity with your hands, but you also have the capacity to imagine,” he says. Indeed, he argues that liberal learning can be even more powerful for students from disadvantaged backgrounds because they can connect what they study with their own experience.

Still, Ahmad and the university’s early leaders understood that for AUW to attract students, it would have to offer degrees that they, and their parents, valued. Students spend a year taking a general-education core curriculum – including ethics, literature, and natural science – that would be familiar to any American liberal-arts graduate. The college’s half-dozen majors, however, skew practical in fields like environmental science, public health, and bioinformatics, the first such program in Bangladesh. (AUW plans to offer more degree programs once a permanent campus is built and it expands to its planned student body of 3,000.)

“We want to cultivate the poet’s sense of imagination,” Ahmad says, “and the engineer’s knack for getting things done.”

For Rohinee, who is now 22, coming to AUW was a tough adjustment. All her life, her parents and teachers had told her what to study. Suddenly freed from that structure, she was terrified of making the wrong choices, of wasting her time.

The requirement to sample widely took her out of her comfort zone, like when she took a mandatory performance course. Shy and reserved, she already found AUW, where the emphasis is on sisterly bonding, stressful. Sometimes, she would take her books and study in the darkened gym, the one place where it was quiet and she could be alone.

Getting up in front of people in her pantomime class paralyzed her with stage fright. But Rohinee is a conscientious student, so she did it, and after a time, she found being before an audience wasn’t so bad. “I’m still very much an introvert,” she says, a small smile crossing her pensive face, “but at least I’m better at faking it.”

It was in another elective, anthropology, that everything clicked. “My whole life I wanted to understand people,” she says. Anthropology gave her the tools to ask questions, to think critically, to analyze situations from multiple perspectives. It was a good fit for her outsider, observant nature. “I thought, this is something I could belong to,” she says.

Rohinee also grew close to her anthropology professor, Tiffany Cone. AUW’s 70-person faculty tends to fall into one of two categories: Bangladeshi academics who want to return home and be part of changing the educational system, or early or late-career Western academics (raising a family in Chittagong can be tough) attracted by the university’s mission. Cone, a New Zealander with a doctorate in anthropology, doesn’t really fit either model. She came to AUW to make a film and, several months in, was asked to join the faculty as an assistant professor. She’s been there for four years, an unusually long tenure for a foreign professor.

Cone encouraged Rohinee to follow her passions and curiosities. She lent her books and answered her questions. With Cone’s encouragement, Rohinee, who grew up in a conservative, Muslim family, began to practice meditation.

Rohinee realized she had been taking courses for the sake of passing them. Cone, she says, “inspired me to find the one big thing that inspires me.”

Her plan is to get a graduate degree in anthropology. Her dream school is the Johns Hopkins University; to save money, she tutors three local students, for five hours a day.

Rohinee has found her vocation, but there’s one hitch: She hasn’t told her parents, who expect that when she graduates next spring she’ll use her degree, in economics, to go into banking or the corporate sector. Maybe she can put off the talk, she figures, because her parents will be so proud if she gets accepted into a good graduate program. And then? “I hope I won’t have to explain it,” she says, “because they will see that I am on my path.”

Another Chance

Before she came to AUW last fall, it had been seven years since Tofrida had been in a classroom.

Growing up in Myanmar’s Rakhine State, Tofrida, who like many Rohingya Muslims goes by only one name, had been a good student. She and her best friend were heading to college, both planning to major in physics.

Her plans abruptly changed when the country’s autocratic government barred Rohingya students from attending college, part of a broader campaign of repression and violence against the Muslim minority. Soon, nearly all formal education, from primary school to university, would become off limits to the Rohingya.

Tofrida’s friend, part of the Buddhist majority, earned her degree and is now a teacher. Tofrida instead went to work for several NGOs, distributing food and counseling women on maternal and child health. “I did not have a chance” at an education, Tofrida says. “They think if we got higher education, we would challenge their position.”

Then, in August 2017, Tofrida says, security forces entered her hometown and ordered all the Rohingya to leave. The soldiers burned their homes and threatened murder and rape. She saw them shoot many people. Tofrida’s family was unharmed, but they escaped with only the clothes they were wearing. It took them 15 days to reach the refugee camps at Cox’s Bazar, in southeast Bangladesh.

“Sometimes I feel lucky because I am alive and safe,” Tofrida says. “But sometimes I feel I am so unlucky because I lost everything.”

Living in the world’s largest refugee settlement – nearly 1 million Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh – Tofrida’s future seemed bleak. At the overcrowded camps, students cannot study. There is no work.

One day, her father heard a report on BBC Radio about AUW. That’s how she learned that there was an international university just 100 miles to the north that admitted Rohingya students. Tofrida might get another chance.

Rohingya refugees are not the only students from underprivileged backgrounds AUW serves. It enrolls daughters of microfinance borrowers and laborers from tea plantations and residents of remote mountain villages that have never sent anyone, let alone a woman, to college. Graduates of Islamic madrasas learn next to victims of sex trafficking. The owners of some of Bangladesh’s many garment factories not only allowed AUW to recruit from among their workers but agreed to pay the women’s wages while they went to school.

Still, AUW’s commitment to socioeconomic diversity doesn’t come cheap. Educating and housing each student costs $15,000 each year, Rao, the vice chancellor, says. The university – which largely has been reliant on support from governments, international development agencies, and philanthropic organizations like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – is trying to recruit more students who can pay at least part of the cost of their education. This past year, it took in $1.5 million in tuition revenues, and eventually, administrators hope the split will be 50-50 between tuition-paying and scholarship students.

That change has alarmed some faculty members, who wonder if pursuit of financial sustainability could undercut AUW’s access mission. As the university has enrolled more middle-class students, it has given rise to class tensions and culture clashes: One first-year student complained about the hygiene of her roommate, who, until recently, had been sleeping in a tent in a refugee camp. The roommate, in return, saw the first-year student, who comes from a middle-class family, as careless and inconsiderate for leaving her possessions throughout the room and playing music late at night.

“Among the fee-paying students, there seems to be a feeling that we paid for this education, so we’re owed some consideration,” says Helen Delfield, an associate professor of political science. “We’re seeing more bullying of students who are perceived to be inferior.”

At the start of one class session, Rania Kassem, an instructor of English language and composition, addresses the issue head-on. Saying she has heard rumors of squabbling between day students (who tend to pay tuition) and resident students (who don’t), she admonishes them, “This reminds me to remind you that we are a community.”

Kassem teaches in the Access Academy, a yearlong pre-college program that prepares students to handle AUW’s rigorous liberal-arts curriculum. Students focus on critical thinking, problem solving, and, most critically, written and spoken English. Students at AUW speak more than 25 different languages, and most have never studied in a classroom where English was the language of instruction.

“I try to remember when I’m working with students that it is a language deficit, not an academic one,” Kassem says, as her students huddle in small groups preparing short skits to illustrate the concept of comparison and contrast. “In another language, I could discuss Foucault with them.”

Students like Tofrida, however, who come to AUW with the most rudimentary English or little formal schooling, must go through an additional year of pre-college study. She spends hours each day learning English and math and works into the night, doing language practice in the computer lab.

Sometimes she gets embarrassed by her struggles. “My brain is still good,” she says. “But English is a hard language for us.” Despite the long odds, the attrition rate for Rohingya students is less than 10 percent.

Whenever she is frustrated, she reminds herself that this is her one opportunity. She has been driven from her home. She is stateless, she has no passport, no permanent address. Sometimes she worries that she and her family could be forcibly repatriated, that she could have to leave AUW.

Telling her story, Tofrida pauses. Her deep-set eyes flash with ferocity. “I cannot fail. I cannot,” she says. And then she cries.

“Sometimes I wonder,” she says, “if it is real or if I imagine myself to be here. It is like a dream. It is like my dream come true.”

Questioning Old Assumptions

The Bijayata Gurung who first came to AUW is not the one who graduated in May.

She had grown up the sheltered youngest child in a big Nepalese family, a top student who effortlessly came by her good grades. At a school counselor’s suggestion, she applied to AUW.

Arriving in Chittagong, she found herself surrounded by strangers, from countries and cultures very different than her own. Students at AUW come from wildly different backgrounds, from religions that have been at odds with one another for generations. Some students love listening to K-pop; others are from societies where dancing isn’t allowed. They grew up high in mountain villages or on the monsoonal plain or in teeming cities. They thought Nepalese food was too spicy – or too bland. They were homesick for po cha and saltah and tam muk muang. They have only English in common, and, at first, they don’t speak it very well.

Bijayata hid her discomfort – and, she says, her judgment – behind a forced smile. It didn’t take long, though, for the strangers to become sisters. The seniors took the newcomers under their wing, welcoming them with cakes and painting their hands with henna. When Bijayata would cry late at night from homesickness, her roommates would climb in bed to comfort her.

It wasn’t just her fellow students who were nurturing. In her courses, she was exposed to new ideas and information, challenged to think through her assumptions, taught to analyze rigorously. She soaked in philosophies and theories; her mind blossomed.

Delfield, the political-science professor, says she is struck by AUW students’ intellectual curiosity. They ask for extra reading, they interrupt class with their questions. “I’d like to think that it is me,” Delfield says, “but what professor here is not six weeks behind in the syllabus?”

In an upper-level comparative politics course not long ago, Delfield and her students volley back and forth about the idea of positive and negative rights. Some countries emphasize positive rights – the obligations of a country toward its citizens – while in others, the focus is on guaranteeing individual freedoms.

“Let’s get cynical, we’re political scientists,” Delfield says. “Why are some countries serious about positive rights?”

“To keep the people from rebellion!” shouts a student who says she was raised in such a society.

Bijayata, too, found herself questioning the norms and expectations with which she had been raised: What was the difference between ethics and cultural assumptions? Why were certain practices like surrogacy stigmatized? Why could her brother come and go as he pleased, while she had to ask her father for permission?

When Bijayata returned to Kathmandu for a break, it didn’t go well. She felt detached. Her family thought she was arrogant. “My father was disappointed in my big rebellion,” she says.

The awkward reunion is a staple of kids returning home from college, of course. With AUW, though, the familial culture clash can be magnified. In this part of the world, gender segregation is routine. If AUW weren’t a single-sex institution, many parents wouldn’t have let their daughters study abroad. Many wouldn’t have let them go to college at all.

They sent their daughters to AUW, not to think bigger but to shelter them, to keep them safe.

Behind the university’s gates, manned by guards around-the-clock, students say they do feel safe – to try new things, to succeed, to fail, to experiment. That sense of freedom is reflected in their clothes. Some women continue to dress modestly, covering their heads and even their faces when men are around. But it’s not uncommon to see a woman in an abaya linking arms with a friend in a tank top. Students dye their hair pink and purple, they wear sweatpants and even pajamas to class.

Bijayata wore shorts and T-shirts and let her hair go wild and curly in Chittagong’s heat. She took classes on gender and joined the student government. She learned Bengali so she could more easily explore on her own. “At AUW, I found a place that I could be myself,” she says.

Rather than go home for the summer, she decided to take an internship with an NGO in India focused on reproductive health. But even as she felt more empowered, something nagged her. “If I can’t change the ideology of my family members,” she says, “how can I change society?”

It’s a fundamental question for AUW, an institution devoted to women’s leadership and to raising women’s voices. Yet many graduates come from and return to places where women have not led, where their voices are silent.

Cone, the anthropology professor, says she worries that AUW spends a lot of time orienting students to college life but comparatively little preparing them to readjust to life after graduation. For instance, there are many places where it’s not appropriate, or even dangerous, to talk about subjects like feminism, she says.

Ahmad acknowledges the challenge: “There is always a gap between the world we believe in and the world we have to live in,” he says. But he argues that AUW graduates are able to navigate the gap, having spent their first 18 years living in those cultures.

To Ahmad, proof of AUW’s impact is in its alumnae. Many have taken jobs in government, in the office of the first lady of Afghanistan and the National Assembly of Cambodia and for the United Nations. Others work with NGOs and development organizations. A growing number are in graduate programs around the world, many at prestigious universities including Columbia, Duke, and Oxford.

Bijayata decided to take the corporate route, joining a multinational travel company. She was living at home again, and while she and her father did not always agree, they had come to an understanding. “He told me, ‘To guide you had been my responsibility,’” she says, “‘but now I know you have seen the wider world.’”

As educated women, Bijayata and her classmates believe they will have an impact on the world. Wherever they go, they know they will be the change.

Karin Fischer reported from Bangladesh with the support of the International Reporting Projectvdrwvwttvzfrwsrrabdrtdbz. She writes about international education, colleges and the economy, and other issues. She’s on Twitter @karinfischer, and her email address is [email protected].