BRAC began its Non-Formal Primary Education Programme in 1985 with 22 one-room schools and by 2003 it was operating more than 34,000 schools under the new name of BRAC Education Programme or BEP. These schools account for about 11% of the primary school children in Bangladesh and go towards fulfilling BRAC’s stated goal of poverty reduction through access to Non-Formal Primary Education for those traditionally outside formal schooling. BRAC hopes that providing an educational outlet for students outside the government formal schools will lead to the strengthening of the national education. This can only be done by an improved, full-range primary curriculum that will allow learners to retain and use the literacy, numeracy and life-skills that it provides. The BRAC schools teach the same competencies as the government schools; however, they enroll and retain a higher proportion of hard-to-reach children, such as girls, who make up 65% of the student body. BEP has been particularly successful in persuading conservative communities in remote rural areas to send their girls to school. The BEP model has been adopted in about a dozen countries, although none to the same scale as in Bangladesh. In 2002 BRAC opened its first international office, in Kabul, and is currently operating more than 90 schools for adolescent girls in rural Afghanistan.