Empowering Girls Through Math: RSM & SOLA

We're proud to share that RSM has partnered with SOLA, the School of Leadership Afghanistan, co-founded by Shabana Basij-Rasikh! By supporting SOLA's pioneering work, RSM is continuing its mission to empower girls to develop confidence, math fluency, and instill a lifelong love for learning.

"Here at RSM we are always looking for the opportunity to make a difference," said Inessa Rifkin, RSM Founder. "Empowering girls is so close to the heart of what we do at RSM, as we are a company founded by women. We are honored to partner alongside another powerful and inspiring woman, like Shabana."

Shabana Basij-Rasikh grew up attending school in secret during the Taliban's rule. She went on to attend a year of high school in the United States through the State Department's Youth Exchange Studies program and later attended Middlebury College in Vermont. In 2008, Shabana co-founded SOLA with the mission of providing access to quality education for girls across Afghanistan. 

SOLA opened its doors as a boarding school in 2016 in Kabul, Afghanistan, and was the first boarding school for Afghan girls. Their inaugural class of 24 girls, chose a path that would have been unthinkable under the Taliban's regime 15 years previously. On August 15, 2021, Kabul fell to the Taliban, making it incredibly dangerous for SOLA to continue its work in the country. Ten days later, the nearly 250 members of the SOLA community completed their evacuation from Afghanistan to Rwanda, and resumed classes on August 29, where they continue to this day. 

SOLA reached out to RSM in 2022 to ask about providing math education for their students. Ralitsa Dimitrova, RSM’s VP of People and Culture, immediately took to the project. “It is an honor to be a part of these girls’ educational journey,” Dimitrova said. The project faced its challenges - needing to adapt RSM’s weekly program to a daily-school day schedule, accounting for gaps in knowledge across ages given many of the students’ challenging histories, not to mention language barriers. But, with a team of passionate RSM teachers behind her - Dimitrova made it work. Many pieces needed to be put together on both sides in order for this project to happen but the partnership officially began in the 2024-2025 school year. “This program is close to the hearts of our teachers, so it didn’t matter what was needed to move forward or what time of day we needed to log on to teach - we were going to get it right.  I’m particularly grateful to Valentina Ivanova, our project coordinator who has put her heart into managing this effort. The group of 9 girls we worked with last year demonstrated extraordinary progress at the end of the year. This year, we were able to identify and train a great team of educators, over different time zones, who are adapting our curriculum towards the needs of a group of 72 SOLA students at different mathematical levels. Our teachers provide between 2 to 4 hours of math instruction weekly" Dimitrova said.

We had the honor of speaking with Shabana to learn more about their inspiring mission and the incredible work they are doing for girls around the world.

What moment pushed you to start SOLA, first as a school in Afghanistan and then the move to Rwanda?

I co-founded SOLA in 2008 when I was a college freshman, and we became a full-time boarding school in 2016, but the seeds of SOLA’s creation – the notion of a place where Afghan girls would always, always be free to receive an education – were planted even earlier, when I was still a child.

The Taliban first came to power in 1996, when I was 6 years old. They were driven out in 2001. During these years, it was literally illegal for girls to go to school in Afghanistan. Women were beaten in the street for being immodest. This was our world. But families still found ways to educate girls, in secret schools run by the bravest women I’ve ever known. My parents ensured that I was able to attend some of these schools.

I was 11 when the Taliban fell in 2001, and girls regained the right to openly attend school. However, the Taliban had burned all the academic records of female students, which meant that girls had to take placement tests to determine which grade they should be enrolled in. I came to my school in Kabul, I took my test, I was placed in 6th grade which of course was age-appropriate for me – and I looked around my classroom, and I saw that my classmates were all five or six years older than me.

These were girls who hadn’t been able to go to secret schools. They’d been in 6th grade when the Taliban came, and now they were in their mid to late teens, and they were going right back into 6th grade now that the Taliban were gone.

I will never forget that day, because that was the day I fully realized what my parents had done for me, and what all those women who’d taught me in their living rooms had done for me. If there’s a day that started me on my path to who I am right now, it was that day.

Can you speak to the importance of education? What changes when girls are given the opportunity to pursue it?

Everything. One word: everything. Everything changes.

Educated girls earn higher incomes. Educated girls marry later. Educated girls have fewer and healthier children. Educated girls live lives with agency. Educated girls create societal change.

Educated girls become educated women who raise and teach educated girls who become educated women who teach even more girls. When girls are given the opportunity to pursue education, we create a virtuous circle, a rising spiral that elevates their families, their nations, and ultimately the entire world.

RSM and SOLA have a shared belief in education, and we in particular, are especially passionate about math. Can you speak to the importance of math education for girls?

Math opens doors to STEM careers where women continue to be underrepresented. Math teaches problem-solving skills and logic that can be tapped in all areas of life. Its value is profound not just in professional settings but in helping every girl become a fully engaged global citizen, and in a world that so often tells young girls that they aren’t good in math before they have a chance to explore it for themselves, educating girls in math builds confidence.

How does the RSM curriculum help your students day-to-day?

RSM promises tremendous growth in students' mathematical abilities. The program emphasizes deep understanding of concepts, identifies each student's strengths and areas of growth, and provides the right level of challenge. Students advance once they have truly mastered the concepts. 

The other way in which RSM is engaging with students at SOLA is by supplementing the courses the students are taking. Students will have 3 classes each week with their SOLA teachers and 2 classes each week with their RSM instructors. The goal is for RSM to fill in any gaps in the students' math knowledge to support their future progression to advanced courses later on.

What are some of your goals for SOLA for the future?

We’re currently building our new campus in Rwanda which we’ll open for the school year starting in September 2026; at full enrollment, we’ll have 300 Afghan girls with us there. We’re also growing our SOLAx digital learning platform which we launched in March 2024: right now, SOLAx reaches over 23,000 learners in Afghanistan and the global diaspora, and that number’s only growing. 

SOLA is and always will be a place where ordinary Afghan girls gather as sisters to do extraordinary things...and SOLA is and always will be a place where extraordinary Afghan girls gather as sisters to do what should be the most ordinary thing in the world. They go to school. 

It should be ordinary. It isn’t – but it will be. We will normalize girls’ education. This is where we’re heading. We will make the extraordinary, ordinary. 

Thank you very much Shabana, we are looking forward to our continued partnership and wish you every success as you continue to empower young girls. We are honored to be part of this journey. Learn more about SOLA on their website.