Central Asia Institute’s mission is to empower communities of Central Asia through literacy and education, especially for girls, promote peace through education and convey the importance of these activities globally.

The videos listed below have been culled from CAI’s extensive video archive. They were chosen to highlight our programs in Afghanistan and Pakistan, expound on the many benefits of educating children in developing countries and demonstrate the role of education in building a peaceful world.

More than 130 million children in the world are illiterate, according to the United Nations. For myriad reasons, those children – more than half of whom are girls – will enter adulthood unable to read and write, develop their potential, achieve their goals and participate fully in society.

Yet numerous studies show that educating a girl to at least the fifth-grade level has a profound impact: girls marry later, infant and maternal mortality drop, household income rises and basic health improves.

This video tells the history of CAI’s programs in Pakistan, Afghanistan and the United States. It includes footage of CAI cofounder Greg Mortenson visiting villages and CAI projects that are fulfilling CAI’s mission to promote peace, one school at a time.

Length: 8 minutes.

In the United States, a penny doesn’t buy much.

But in the remote regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan where CAI works, a penny buys a pencil. And a pencil is a precious tool.

CAI’s Pennies for Peace program is about the power of those copper coins so many of us take for granted. The program encourages children, ultimately our future leaders, to be active participants in global peace by collecting pennies to buy school supplies for their peers half a world away. It is designed to educate children about the world beyond their experience and show them that they can make a difference in the world, one penny at a time.

In this video, Greg Mortenson’s daughter Amira tells the story of P4P, which has grown from an idea hatched at Westside Elementary School in Wisconsin, to a program implemented in more than 4,000 schools worldwide.

CAI has program resources available that include a toolkit with a standards-aligned K-12 curriculum, videos, fact sheets, implementation guide, maps and much more. Learn more by visiting www.penniesforpeace.org.

Length: 7 minutes.

“Not everyone has what we have and I think we take a lot of it for granted.”

That comment comes from a former Westside Elementary School student who was part of the first-ever penny drive to raise money to help Greg Mortenson build a school in the Karakoram Mountains of northern Pakistan.

Pennies for Peace was conceived in 1994 by students and teachers at Westside School in River Falls, Wisc., where Greg Mortenson’s mother, Jerene, was the principal. Since the students represented a broad socioeconomic spectrum, the teachers opted to focus on pennies because, as one teacher says, “Everyone has a penny.”

The students raised a whopping 62,340 pennies for Mortenson’s project, the largest donation he had received at that time.

“If you think about it, it wasn’t famous people, it wasn’t celebrities, it wasn’t movie stars, it wasn’t sports heroes, it was children reaching out to children halfway around the world, and they did it with pennies,” Mortenson says in the video.

Originally called Pennies for Pakistan, the program was quickly renamed to reflect the broader mission of education and empowerment.

Length: 7 minutes.

The song, just like the book “Three Cups of Tea”, advocates education in the Islamic countries of central and southwest Asia – specifically, the education of girls.

The heroes in the song are the children who, in the face of adversity, oppression and poverty, relentlessly pursue the dream of learning to read and write. For lack of adequate facilities, children often write their lessons in the sand with sticks.

The song was composed by Jake Fleming and originally sung by Amira Mortenson, Greg Mortenson’s daughter, and jazz musician Jeni Fleming, of Bozeman, Mont. In this version, Amira carries the song with a children’s choir providing harmony.

Images of students in CAI’s schools, Greg drinking tea and meeting students in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Length: 6 minutes.

A few years ago, Amira Mortenson interviewed her dad, CAI cofounder Greg Mortenson, about his work and the organization he founded just before she was born.

Amira’s Q&A with her dad, filmed as they walked in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado in 2008, covers questions children and adults often have about CAI, Pennies for Peace, and Greg Mortenson.

Length: 4 minutes.

International news cameraman Mike Simon juxtaposes archival footage of CAI’s first project in Afghanistan with updated video of the people and projects that make up CAI’s efforts to promote peace through education in Afghanistan.

The film begins with footage of fighting in Kabul in 2010 and through interviews, video clips and still photos tells the story of a war-ravaged country that has grown weary of fighting, death and loss.

In Afghanistan, CAI’s cofounder Greg Mortenson found a yearning for education that “never seems to end,” and took up the challenge to turn stones into schools and honor those people who have paid the ultimate sacrifice.

Length: 13 minutes.