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Editor's note: Shabana Basij-Rasikh is one of National Geographic's 2014 emerging explorers, a designation that honors tomorrow's visionariesthose making discoveries, making a difference, and inspiring people to care about the planet.

Shabana Basij-Rasikh thinks she knows the secret to healing ethnic tensions that arose from more than 30 years of war in Afghanistan, improving the struggling economy, and fixing the devastated infrastructure: girls.

Having co-founded her home country's first boarding school for girls in 2008, Basij-Rasikh believes that women are the nation's most valuable untapped natural resource. Her nonprofit School of Leadership, Afghanistan in Kabul offers college prep courses and helps graduates get into universities around the world.

The hope is that they come back to pursue careers in Afghanistan.

"These young women are the generation that can bring peace and prosperity back to our country," says Basij-Rasikh, 24, who was educated in secret during the repressive Taliban regime. (Read a Q&A with Basij-Rasikh.)

From 1996 until 2001, when the Taliban was toppled by U.S.-led forces, Afghanistan's women were barred from participating in politics and business. The fundamentalist Islamic regime also made it illegal for girls to go to school.

By 2007, only 6 percent of Afghan women 25 years or older had received any formal education. Even today, the illiteracy rate for rural women hovers around 90 percent. (Related: "New Afghan Law Disastrous for Women, Says National Geographic Photographer.")

To chip away at that number, the School of Leadership has helped students from across Afghanistan access more than ten million dollars in scholarships. The school has 35 students, ages 12 to 18, and is working to boost enrollment to 340 in the next five years.

"The most effective antidote to the Taliban is to create the best educated leadership generation in Afghanistan's history," says Basij-Rasikh. "Our girls todaythe women of tomorrowwill make it happen."

Key to meeting that goal, she says, is involving women from around the world. Each student at School of Leadership, Afghanistanor SOLA, which means "peace" in the Pashtun languageis matched with a volunteer mentor from abroad to Skype with twice a week. Mentors and students discuss current events and books and talk through communications challenges, college applications, and personal problems.

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A Native Daughter Returns to Afghanistan on Daring Mission: Educating Girls