September marked 3 years since the Taliban banned education beyond the secondary level for Afghan girls. More than 1,100 days have passed and there is no progress in reinstating education for girls in Afghanistan.
The absence of education has also led to mental health issues – teenage girls struggling everyday not being able to go to school only because they are girls. In Afghanistan, “the mental health professionals consistently highlighted the severe consequences of university closures for female students. Anxiety, mood disorders, depression, isolation, and loneliness were frequently reported issues. The experts noted a disturbing increase in suicidal ideation among these students, attributing it to the social mistrust, disbelief, and despair resulting from gender discrimination and severe restrictions imposed by the Taliban.”
To make the situation worse for Afghan girls, it is becoming increasingly difficult for girls to access mental health support. The Taliban’s restrictions on women working, women leaving the house with a mahram -a male chaperone-, and a crumbling healthcare system with closing clinics because of a lack of proper funding and domestic leadership are all factors that create difficulty in finding support for these women.
Additionally, the long term impacts of a lack of education for Afghan girls and Afghanistan are severe. Education is the foundation of an individual’s future life and the foundation of a country’s future growth.
A future without educated women means a workforce that is not contributing to the prosperity of Afghanistan, a struggling healthcare and legal system, increased human rights violations, child marriage rates, poverty rates, and the declining health of women and children.
According to a report released by the UN Development Programme in 2022, “No country has prospered by leaving half of its population behind, and the loss to the Afghan economy alone is estimated at a billion dollars a year – in addition to any future losses through limits placed on education, skills, dignities and capabilities investment.” This is the dim future Afghanistan is facing by excluding women from the workforce and the educational field.
Ironically, while the Taliban bans Afghan girls from education, their own children, including the Taliban daughters, attend schools abroad. According to a report by the Afghanistan Analysts Network, the “majority of those living in Doha enrolled their school-aged daughters in school.” The “daughter of one leader, who holds a ministerial job and was previously a member of the Rahbari or Leadership Shura in Quetta, is now studying medicine in a Qatari university.”
UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell said it best, “The rights of children, especially girls, cannot be held hostage to politics. Their lives, future, hopes and dreams are hanging in the balance.”
This is a value that the international community should uphold. Education worldwide should be the standard. Regardless of political tension and power struggles, girls’ education cannot be politicized or exploited for personal and political gains – as the Taliban regime has done in Afghanistan.
Sources: Afghanistan Analysts Network, UNICEF, Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education, UNSDG, ScienceDirect,
