(Paris) The Taliban have “deliberately deprived” 1.4 million Afghan women of secondary education since their return to power three years ago to the day, according to data published Thursday by UNESCO.
“Afghanistan is today the only country in the world to prohibit access to education for girls over the age of 12 and for women,” deplores UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay in a press release.
“The right to education cannot suffer from any negotiation or compromise. The international community must remain fully mobilized to obtain the unconditional reopening of schools and universities for Afghan girls and women.”
Including those who were out of school even before the fundamentalists returned to power, there are now 2.5 million Afghan women deprived of secondary education, or 80% of girls of school age.
The Taliban have also banned women from tutoring boys, even as the country suffers from a shortage of qualified teachers.
These restrictions are weakening the school system as a whole and are leading to a “drastic drop” in enrollment in primary education, including boys, as well as in higher education, 53% since 2021, notes the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
Behind this phenomenon, UNESCO is concerned about possible increases in “child labour and early marriages”, but also a shortage of skills, likely to harm the country’s development in the long term.
To circumvent the bans and offer alternatives to Afghan families, initiatives have developed, locally and from abroad.
The Paris-based NGO Begum Organization for Women founded a radio station in March 2021 and then a cable television channel in March 2024.
Every day, six hours of educational television content are prepared by a team of ten Afghan journalists and broadcast by satellite to Afghanistan in the country’s two languages, Dari and Pashto.
UNESCO, which supports many initiatives such as Begum TV, also stresses that “nothing can replace in-person education in a classroom.”
The UN organization specifies that “more than 1,000 facilitators, including 780 women, have been trained to provide literacy classes” already benefiting “more than 55,000 young people, the vast majority of whom are girls, in nearly 1,900 villages. But the task remains immense given the number of people who are out of school.”
Since their return to power in August 2021, the Taliban have imposed their very restrictive interpretation of Islamic law, Sharia, multiplying liberticidal measures against women, a policy described as “gender apartheid” by the UN.
Women have been largely banned from public administrations. They are forbidden from entering parks, gardens, gyms and public baths and are required to cover themselves completely when leaving their homes.
A policy which largely explains the isolation of the Taliban on the international scene, their government not having been formally recognised by any country to date.