Photo credit: NBC News
An estimated 2.4 million Afghan girls remain excluded from secondary school education five years after the Taliban took over the country, a UN agency said Tuesday, renewing a call for an immediate restoration of their right to education.
AP reports that UNESCO, the Paris-based UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, said the continued exclusion of women and girls from education amounted to a grave violation of their fundamental human rights.
“Afghanistan remains the only country in the world where girls and women are formally banned from secondary and higher education,” Hoda Jaberian, UNESCO’s program coordinator for education in emergencies, said in a news conference. “Five years is not a temporary interruption in a child’s education. It is clearly almost an entire secondary school cycle.”
Jaberian said: “UNESCO continues to call for the immediate and unconditional restoration of girls and women’s right to secondary and higher education. It is not negotiable. It’s a basic right, and we reiterate that there is no substitute for this.”
The Taliban seized power on August 15, 2021, as US and NATO forces withdrew from the country after two decades of war.
Shortly after, it barred girls from secondary school and later extended the restrictions to higher education, employment and other sectors, effectively excluding women and girls from public life.
The Taliban has maintained the ban despite appeals from the United Nations, humanitarian groups, human-rights advocates, and several Islamic countries, insisting the issue is a domestic one.
Jaberian says the restrictions are reversing two decades of progress that Afghanistan has made in education. While access to schooling for girls was severely limited in 2001, by 2021, nearly 1 million girls were enrolled in secondary education.
