NEW YORK: Afghan Taliban “have almost wiped out more than twenty years of steady progress for education” in Afghanistan, putting the future of an entire generation in jeopardy, the UN educational, scientific and cultural agency (UNESCO) said. Afghanistan is currently the only nation in the world where secondary and higher education is strictly banned to women and girls over age 12, the UN agency stated.
Afghan Taliban swept back into power on 15 August 2021 and swiftly stated curtailing women’s rights, it was pointed out. Three years to the day after the fall of Kabul, around 1.4 million girls have been “deliberately” denied access to education because of the bars.
Apart from the girls who were already out of school before the Taliban’s reimposition of strict religious legal codes, there are now about 2.5 million girls in the war-hit country deprived of their right to education, representing around 80 % of Afghan school age girls. UNESCO said that there has also been a decline by over half of the number of students enrolled in universities since 2021.
As a result, Afghanistan will face a shortage of graduates trained for highly skilled jobs, which will only exacerbate development hurdles, the report said. While girls’ education is technically still allowed under the age of 12, the number of those enrolled in primary education has fallen drastically since 2021.
The UNESCO data suggests that Afghanistan had just only 5.7 million girls and boys in primary school in 2022, compared with 6.8 million in 2019. This decline in primary school enrollment is the result of the Afghan Taliban’s decision to stop female teachers from teaching boys, worsening a teacher shortage. It can also be explained by parents’ lack of incentive to send their kids to school in an increasingly difficult socioeconomic situation. It is also feared that the increasing drop-out rate could lead to an upsurge in child labour and early marriage.
Since 2021, UNESCO has set up programmes with the support of local people in 20 of the country’s 34 provinces. Over 1,000 facilitators, including 780 women, have been trained to deliver literacy courses, benefiting more than 55,000 young people, the vast majority of them girls.
UNESCO invests in distance learning via television and radio, providing financial support and training to Afghan media wishing to develop and broadcast educational programmes. The UN agency continues to call on the international community to fully commit to restoring the right to education for girls and women in Afghanistan, saying that face-to-face education in a classroom is the best possible way for people to learn.
“The right to education cannot be compromised or negotiated. The world must remain fully mobilized to obtain the unconditional reopening of schools and universities to Afghan women,” emphasized Audrey Azoulay, DG of UNESCO.
Meanwhile, 36 UN experts are also calling on the world not to normalize the Taliban in Afghanistan in a joint statement released Wednesday.
The rights experts, who report to the Human Rights Council and who are not UN staff, include the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett.
“Over the last three years, the people of Afghanistan, particularly women and girls, have been subjected to an appalling and intensifying assault on their rights and freedoms by a regime that lacks legitimacy and inclusivity, quashes all shapes of dissent, represses civil society and the media and has shown a flagrant disrespect for the principles of justice, equality, non-discrimination and the rule of law,” the rights experts said.
The experts also emphasized that the deliberate subjugation of girls and women is so widespread and systematic that it has come to amount to crimes against humanity, including the crime of gender oppression.
The situation is so extreme that many people in Afghanistan say it is best described as “gender apartheid”. “The people of Afghanistan also deserve to live in a nation where the rights, dignity and humanity of all are respected as well as protected. Now more than ever is the time for robust global action to meet their demands with increased support, protection as well as solidarity,” they further said.
