Giving Afghan girls the education they demand

 

Three years after the Taliban’s return to power, and with the world distracted by other crises, Afghanistan seldom makes global headlines anymore. But make no mistake: conditions in the country continue to deteriorate, with devastating consequences for ordinary Afghans, especially girls and women.

Afghanistan emerged from decades of proxy wars as one of the world’s poorest countries, a situation that the Taliban regime has only exacerbated: millions of Afghans don’t know where their next meal is coming from, and the economy has all but collapsed.

Moreover, the Taliban’s religious leadership continues to violate human rights through what the United Nations (UN) describes as an 

institutionalised system of gender-based oppression

.

This systemic discrimination includes severely restricting girls’ and women’s freedom of movement, expression, and association, prohibiting them from nearly all forms of employment, and curtailing their access to justice.

Perhaps most troubling is the Taliban’s prohibition of girls’ attendance at secondary schools. The damage caused by the ban – both to an entire generation of girls and to the future of the country – is fast becoming irreversible.

In addition to being a flagrant human-rights violation, excluding Afghan girls and women from education is remarkably short-sighted, as their potential could be harnessed to rebuild the country.

Tragically, the lack of prospects for their daughters puts even more pressure on crisis-stricken families: the education ban is associated with a 25% increase in the rate of child marriage, which tends to be followed by early pregnancy. These children will be born to mothers who are illiterate, which surely does not serve Afghanistan’s long-term interest.

The Taliban’s gender apartheid has no basis in Afghan culture, and Afghanistan is the only Muslim country to prohibit girls and women from attending school. In fact, education for all is a fundamental principle in Islam.

As UN deputy secretary-general Amina J Mohammed recently reminded the world, Prophet Muhammad said 

seeking knowledge is obligatory upon every Muslim,

 including both men and women, boys and girls.

No matter what the clerics in Kandahar say, Afghans across the country want their sons and daughters to receive an education. They care deeply about the welfare of their families, communities, and country.

Tellingly, the organisations delivering education and remote-learning services in Afghanistan are struggling to keep up with demand. And the powerful testimonies of Afghan girls affected by the ban, shared as part of Education Cannot Wait’s #AfghanGirlsVoices campaign, demonstrate their desire to study.

I lived and worked in Afghanistan in the early 1990s and have since been back many times, including in 2000, during the first Taliban government, and in August 2021, mere weeks after they retook power.

Over the years, I have been deeply impressed by how, despite their remarkable cultural and ethnic diversity – over 30 different languages are spoken in the country – they all consider themselves to be Afghans.

This rare combination of pride, humility, and tolerance is a defining characteristic of the Afghan people, who are far from resembling their frequent portrayal as a fundamentalist monolith.

To help the vast majority of Afghans who do not support the Taliban’s discriminatory policies, Education Cannot Wait offers thousands of community-based classes – outside the parameters of the formal education system – in some of the country’s most remote and underserved areas. With the help of local populations and strategic partners, we have reached more than 200,000 children and adolescents, nearly 60% of whom are girls.

We must scale up these efforts to provide Afghan girls and women with access to education while continuing to call for an end to human-rights violations. UN agencies and civil-society organisations should work together to expand non-formal schooling in Afghanistan.

To advance this goal, public- and private-sector donors must urgently increase funding for education providers on the ground, so that they can meet the overwhelming demand for community-based learning.

There is no time to waste. An entire generation of girls is at risk of missing out on an education. And an entire country’s future is being jeopardised by edicts with no basis in Islam. - FMT

Yasmine Sherif is executive director of Education Cannot Wait.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.