News and Stories

Dr. Trani led a new study on the impact of stigma on people with severe mental illness in Urban India. Trani, J. F., Yen, B. J., Duncan, A., Bakshi, P., Palmo, T., Jadhav, S., Deshpande. (2023). “People with mental illness stigmatize mental illness less: A comparison study between a hospital-based sample of people with mental […]

We are happy to announce that our recent article on teacher accountability has been published! This article is dedicated to the memory of our dear colleague and co-author Munib Sohail. Trani, J.F., Yin, S., Rfat, M., McKown, M., Cartmill, M. K., Kaplan, L., Zhu, Y., Sohail. M., Bakhshi, P. (2023).“Teachers’ Perspective on Accountability: A Case Study in […]

There was a heavy flood in the area surrounding Hakima Sanayee primary school. The flood damaged many agricultural lands and diminished this past year’s harvest. The school does not have classrooms; instead, students sit under the damaged tents. As we started to conduct the psychosocial activities, heavy rain started to pour. We had to shift the […]

In 2022, the Norwegian Afghanistan Committee designed and implemented a study with the support of Washington University in St. Louis on older adults’ well-being. The study was conducted in 21 schools in Badakhshan province and the Jaighori district of Ghazni province. Currently, in Afghanistan, there are very few services for older adults who experience mental disorders or […]

While Afghanistan faces a deep and huge crisis due to regime change and economic collapse we are implementing the Child Resiliency Afghanistan Study in southern Afghanistan, to promote the resiliency skills of children to protect themselves against the crisis.  The CRAS project was implemented in 10 intervention and 10 control schools in Jaghori, Malistan, and […]

Abdul Rashid is fifty-five years old male living in a village in the vicinity of Kakan school. He participated in our Aging and Dementia work lead by the Norwegian Afghanistan Committee with the support of Washington University in St. Louis. The study was conducted with older adults above 50 years old in 22 schools across […]

We are excited to share our paper that just came out about Poverty and Dementia in rural Afghanistan titled “Multidimensional Poverty is Associated with Dementia Among Adults in Afghanistan”. You can find the open-access version here. Multidimensional poverty in four or five dimensions was strongly associated with dementia among older adults particularly over 70 years […]

The GRID lab team recently presented preliminary findings of their 5-year study, Education Equality and Quality in Afghanistan and Pakistan (EEQAP), at the Society for Social Work and Research (SSWR) 27thAnnual Conference. The three presentations focused respectively on children’s views on inclusive education, teachers’ accountability and the impact of a participatory intervention relying on group model building workshops, […]

The summer of 2022 was characterized by record-breaking extreme climatic variations in Pakistan, where heatwaves were immediately followed by monsoon floods that submerged a third of the country, causing the loss of life for 1,500 people. Overall, it impacted the livelihood of over 33 million people, one third of the country’s population according to UNICEF. Among […]

Pedagogy is most commonly understood as the approach to teaching the theory and practice of learning and how this process influences and is influenced by the social, political, and psychological development of learners. The teaching strategy was being followed by teachers working under National Rural Support Programmers’ Education Equity and Quality in Afghanistan and Pakistan (EEQAP) […]