Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD: Depriving girls and young women from attending classrooms in war-torn Afghanistan could wipe out huge gains the country achieved in education and create a ‘lost generation’, UNESCO (UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) has warned.
The Paris-based UNESCO on Thursday announced that the organization was dedicating the International Day of Education on January 24, to Afghan women and girls.
UNESCO’s Director-General Audrey Azoulay, said, via a statement, that no country in the world should bar women and girls from getting an education and the essence of education being a universal human right must be respected.
She added that the international community has the responsibility to ensure restoration of the basic rights of Afghan females are restored without delay and this anti-education war against women must be stopped.
Last month, the Taliban government in Afghanistan banned female students from universities.
This followed an earlier directive barring girls from attending secondary school, obviously in supervision of the fundamentalists, who ruled in the late 1990s up to 2001, and subsequently regained power in August 2021, sweeping back into the capital, Kabul.
UNESCO on Girls Education
Earlier this week, UNESCO maintained in a separate statement that due to the recent developments in Afghanistan, the country risked a lost generation as educated women were essential for its future development.
“Afghanistan or any other country, cannot improve if half of its population is deprived of getting the education and now allowed to participate in public life.”
From 2001 to 2018, Afghanistan witnessed a tenfold boost in enrollment across all education levels, from roughly one million to 10 million students, as reported by UNESCO.
The number of girls in primary school shoot up from almost zero to 2.5 million. Till August 2021, they accounted for four out of 10 primary school students.
Meanwhile, women’s attendance in higher education also enhanced almost 20 times, from 5,000 students in 2001 to over 100,000 two decades later.
At present, 80 percent of school-aged Afghan females, 2.5 million, are out of school. The said order being announced in December suspending university education for women affects more than 100,000 attending government and private institutions.
UNESCO is calling for prompt and non-negotiable access to the right to education and a speedy return to school for all girls and young women in war-affected Afghanistan.
During the past two decades, UNESCO has assisted the Afghan education system, including supervising a literacy program that covered over 600,000 young people and adults, with having 60 percent representation of women.
After the Taliban takeover of the capital, it has shifted activities to ensure uninterrupted education facilities through community-based literacy and skills development classes for more than 25,000 young people and adults in almost 20 provinces.
