About 1.4 million girls have been banned from accessing any education beyond the age of 12 since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in 2021.
On the three year anniversary of the Taliban’s takeover, UNESCO has published new data revealing the alarming number of women and girls in Afghanistan who continue to be denied secondary and higher education.
Afghanistan is now the only country in the world where secondary and higher education is strictly forbidden to girls and women.
It’s a situation that “must concern us all,” according to Audrey Azoulay, Director- General of UNESCO.
“The right to education cannot be negotiated or compromised,” she said. “The international community must remain fully mobilised to obtain the unconditional reopening of schools and universities to Afghan girls and women.”
The data revealed the devastating educational situation in the country of more than 41 million people. Since the last analysis carried out by UNESCO in April 2023, roughly 300,000 more girls have been forced to end their education, as more and more of them reach the age limit of 12 every year.
In addition of the girls who were already denied schooling prior to the Taliban’s ban in 2021, there are currently up to 2.5 million girls in the country who are not allowed to attend school — that’s roughly 80 per cent of all Afghan school-age girls.
While girls under 12 are allowed to attend school, the number of students enrolled in primary education has dropped over the past several years.
Since the Taliban’s takeover, female teachers have been banned from teaching male students, exacerbating a widespread teacher shortage. In 2019, a total of 6.8 million girls and boys were enrolled in primary school. Three years later, that figure dropped to 5.7 million.
Under the socio-economic constraints placed on the citizens by the de facto authorities, parents are finding it difficult to justify sending their children to school. They also worry about their children’s safety, especially those who have daughters.
According to UNESCO, the drop in education for girls can lead to an increase in child labor and early marriage.
Afghanistan holds one of the world’s worst statistics on child marriage. In 2021, UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore noted the credible reports of families offering daughters as young as 20 days old up for future marriage in return for a dowry.
“I am deeply concerned by reports that child marriage in Afghanistan is on the rise,” she said at the time. “UNICEF’s partners registered 183 child marriages and 10 cases of selling of children over 2018 and 2019 in Herat and Baghdis provinces alone. The children were between 6 months and 17 years of age.”
According to UNICEF, roughly 28 per cent of Afghan women aged 15–49 years are married before the age of 18.
The figures on girls’ and women’s access to higher education is also alarming. In late 2022, women and girls were no longer permitted to attend university after the Taliban issued an order banning them from attending all government and private universities.
A letter signed by the minister for higher education stated that universities were being “informed to implement the mentioned order of suspending education of females until further notice.”
At the time, UN chief’s deputy special representative for Afghanistan, Ramiz Alakbarov, said the UN was “deeply concerned” by the order.
“Education is a fundamental human right. A door closed to women’s education is a door closed to the future of Afghanistan,” Alakbarov said.
Since 2021, the total number of students enrolled in tertiary education has halved, leading to a shortage of highly-skilled graduates and magnifying the country’s development problems.
‘A nightmare’
For Shabnam Safa, a member of the Australian Hazara Advocacy Network and the Action for Afghanistan campaign, the condition for women and girls in Afghanistan is the worst it can it can ever be.
“You could totally describe it as a nightmare,” she told Women’s Agenda. “Since coming to power, the Taliban have made sure that they systematically erase women from society enforcing extreme restrictions on their freedom, banning them from education, most employment opportunities, sports and even leaving their home without a male guardian.”
Since August 2021, the Taliban have imposed aggressive restrictions on women and girls, violating a number of Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Girls and women are banned from playing sports, showing their faces while live on air, establishing beauty parlours, and using contraception, among a range of restrictions.
The brutal regime has made headlines across the world, but Safa believes a lot goes on that remains unreported.
“We keep hearing of women and girls getting arrested and tortured just for not complying to the strict dress code that the Taliban have enforced on women let alone the human rights defenders or protesters or any advocates or journalists,” she said.
“They are arrested, physically and sexually assaulted. Sometimes they’re kidnapped and disappear without anyone knowing what happens to them.”
Safa described the Taliban’s treatment of women as “crimes against humanity” and noted the experts calling it ‘gender apartheid’.
Last month, Penelope Andrews, from New York Law School said that codifying gender apartheid under international law is an essential component of the pursuit of gender equality.
“I fully support broadening the definition of the crime of apartheid to include gender,” she wrote. “I believe this is necessary given the persistence and ubiquity of structural discrimination and violence against women in the world.”
“Codifying “gender apartheid” could go much further than protecting Afghan women and girls. It could offer significant relief to many victims and survivors who otherwise would not be entitled to adequate recourse from the international community and from states. It could also lead to a more effective and concerted international response to gender-based oppression.”
For Safa, another critical factor of the situation in Afghanistan is the western media’s perpetual portrayal of “Afghan women as victims.”
“The narrative around Afghanistan has always been that its women are oppressed, regardless of what’s happening there politically, and that they need to be saved and rescued — which is true, but what we don’t hear about the strength of the women, the resilience of the women and the resistance of the women in Afghanistan,” she said.
“They’re still risking everything. They know what the punishment would be if they get arrested, but they are out there — they’re protesting for their rights, and now it’s a mostly a lonely fight because the rest of the world does not hear them.”
“The women of Afghanistan continue to fight, as they always have, essentially being the only ones who have saved themselves, and that narrative is always missing from the Western media and political discourse about Afghanistan.”
One notable group of women who have been denied attention are the Hazara women, who have suffered a history of persecution for their ethnicity in Afghanistan.
“The Hazara people have long been persecuted in Afghanistan, endured brutal atrocities at the hands of the Taliban in the 90s and are now once again subject to the same horrors,” Safa said.
“Hazara women in particular face additional layers of persecution for their gender and ethnicity. Hazara schools and educational centres are regularly bombed and hundreds of young girls and boys have lost their lives to these targeted attacks under the Taliban regime in the last three years.”
Safa, a Hazara Afghan refugee, believes that the Australian government is not doing enough to support these women. According to her, they should be pulling all the levers and using any diplomatic channels to hold the Taliban accountable for their actions.
“Beyond words of sympathy for the people and women of Afghanistan, there needs to be concrete action to hold the current Taliban regime to account,” she said.
Safa believes the government can also do a lot to help the families who have been separated by assisting with Family Reunion.
“There are hundreds of women and girls who are partners, wives and daughters of men who have sought asylum in Australia, and for a range of policy barriers cannot bring their families here,” she said.
“They cannot reunite. Simplifying and accelerating family reunion applications could be a lifeline to many in Afghanistan right now. That’s something the Australian government can do easily right now to help women in Afghanistan.”