Shortcomings and improvements made in the last decade have symbolized the hard, long journey of Afghans to build a better, prosperous society where people enjoy peace, development and welfare. That, experiments say, is unlikely to come true unless there are strong educational institutions and a healthy education system. It is because a country's development or degradation mainly depends on how it approaches education and to what extent the country pays importance to proficient educational cadres and skilled human resource.

With the scourges of terrorism, corruption and instability, education remains overshadowed. Of course, in this post-conflict era, Afghanistan is severely suffering from multilateral challenges but education sector needs to be cared more significantly.

With all shortfalls, in new epoch, education sector has seen good positive changes but more challenges have remained unaddressed than what the government and the international community has achieved.

Bulk of the shortages in education in Afghanistan is rooted in the very sad period of war and extremists rule over the country. Under the Taliban regime, girls were not allowed to have education at all levels.

But the newly established government in the country and the international community committed to fight poverty, illiteracy and terrorism herein made all-out efforts to rapidly improve the situation and help all boys and girls being enrolled at schools.

With educational policy now in place in the first National Education Strategic Plan for Afghanistan, the country looks set to move further towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) now set at 2020.

However, as the MDG Vision 2020 for Afghanistan, states the "country has a long way to go to meet the minimum set of goals and targets that it has set for itself. Even in comparison to other conflict-affected and landlocked countries, Afghanistan ranks low".

Acknowledging the fact that the basis of human capacity developments, modern values promotion and a constant rule of law are dependent on accessibility to and the level of education development in a country, the works done in Afghanistan for rebuilding the basis of primary and higher education since the Taliban's ouster from power in late 2001 seem relatively more acceptable than other areas of the people's needs.

But it never indicates that no more is expected from the government and the international community. A misfortune is that all parts of the country have not experienced the same level of improvement in this sector.

There are villages across the country that are deprived of the least facilities to educate their children and bring a tiny change in their lives in terms of education and schooling. Hence, the government needs to be alarmed on educational requirements of the nation. More accurate, strategic and long term plans need to be developed to equitably address challenges on the way to build an educated society.