KABUL: Millions of female students in Afghanistan have been unable to attend secondary schools, colleges, and universities for over an year following a ban by the Taliban government as the World marks International Women’s Day on Wednesday.
The United Nations (UN) on Wednesday said Afghanistan, under the government of the Taliban, is the “most repressive country in the world” for women’s rights, with authorities effectively trapping girls and women in their homes.
UN on International Women’s Day
Roza Otunbayeva, head of the United Nations mission in Afghanistan, said in a statement marking International Women’s Day that “It has been distressing to see their methodical, deliberate, and systematic efforts to push Afghan women and girls out of the public sphere,”
2.5m girls out of schools
The Taliban has barred Afghan girls above the sixth grade from attending school since they came to power two years back.
The Taliban initially gave a shortage of teachers and professors, a lack of school infrastructure for gender segregation, and other reasons for the continued closure of schools. Primary schools have been allowed to run.
Few senior Taliban leaders have called for schools to be reopened, saying there was no valid reason in Islam for the ban.
According to UNESCO, currently, 80% of school-aged Afghan girls and women – totalling 2.5 million citizens – are out of schools.
The Taliban government’s decision to keep girls schools closed has reversed significant gains in female education during the past 20 years.
Living with dignity
Hosna Jalil was not even 10 when the Taliban came to power in 1996. During thier rule between 1996-2001, female education was banned, with exceptions for religious education.
The ban affected Jalil who is from a remote village in southeast Ghazni province. Quite determined to continue her education, she joined a community-based educational, religious programme run inside a mosque that taught a formal curriculum without the knowledge of Taliban officials.
She recalled that all the young children had to be ready to take out their religious books and hide their other books in case the Taliban officials raided the mosque.
She said that “we would have stopped breathing because we did not know what would happen if they find out, if one of us would have made an error, and if they find out what was inside our bags. They sometimes even checked our bags,” recalled Jalil. “That is when you could feel the brutality as a child,”
After the fall of Taliban government in 2001, Jalil continued her studies and graduated with a degree in physics from the University of Kabul.
In 2018, at the age of just 26, Jalil was the first Afghan woman appointed to a ministerial position in the ocuntry, serving as a deputy minister of policy in the Women Affairs ministry. She went on to serve several government departments, including the Ministry of Petroleum and the president’s office.
