Afghanistan’s Taliban government has “systematically denied” at least 1. A report from the United Nations has revealed that the party stripped 4 million girls of their right to education in the three years it was in power.
It has become even worse; current assessment shows that between April 2023 and December 2023 alone, an additional 300,000 girls have dropped out of school. The agency claimed that the present signs pointed to ‘the future of an entire generation’.
According to UNESCO, assuming a large number of girls were out of school before the Taliban in August 2021, Some 80% of Afghan girls of school-going age, or 2 million girls, have been forced out of school.
Launched in 2000 in the poorest countries, the Millennium Development Goals, which aim at reducing by at least half the proportion of children, particularly female children, out of school by 2015, reveal a very damning scenario with only five million children enrolled in school, out of the Americas’ fourteen million children who should be in school. Some of the adverse implications that have been associated with this high severity drop-out rate are in the area of child labour and early marriages.
Afghanistan remains the only nation on the planet where girls and women are banned from going to secondary schools and universities. Since the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan, girls above sixth grade have been prohibited from education on the pretext of Sharia law, which is contrary to no other Islamic country.
The UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay said that the international community must stay united so that Afghan girls and women can have schools and universities unconditionally reopened. The current Taliban regime that controls and governs Afghanistan does not have recognition of its governance from the international community, and its treatment of women violates the UN charter as the organisation terms them ‘gender apartheid. ’
The decrease in educational services also encompasses the categories concerning the primary level of education. The total enrollment of primary school children, both boys and girls, declined to 5 in 2022. 7 million from 6. 8 million in 2019. UNESCO blamed this decline on the authorities’ decision to bar female teachers from teaching boys and observed that parents have no reason to take their children to school.
Unfortunately, enrolment in higher education has also been on the decline; now, the number of students in universities is 53 per cent less than in 2021. This was alarming to the organisation as it foresaw a short supply of qualified graduates for skilled jobs important for a country’s development, thus worsening the country’s problems, according to UNESCO.
