Five years after the Taliban takeover on August 15, 2021, an estimated 2.4 million Afghan girls remain excluded from secondary education.
Five Years of Educational Exile and the Lost Secondary Cycle
The milestone marks a bleak turning point for a generation of learners. When the Taliban seized power amid the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces, the de facto authorities acted swiftly to bar girls from secondary schools before eventually extending the prohibitions to universities, employment, and wider public life. Despite sustained appeals from the United Nations, humanitarian agencies, human rights advocates, and several Islamic nations, the Taliban has maintained the restrictions while insisting the policy is an internal domestic matter.
Jaberian noted that five years of closure represents much more than a temporary pause in schooling. It constitutes almost an entire secondary school cycle, effectively locking millions of young women out of the classroom during their formative years. The agency emphasized that the restoration of educational access is a non-negotiable fundamental right for which there is no substitute.
Reversing Two Decades of Progress Across Afghan Communities
The ongoing restrictions have dismantled educational gains that took twenty years to build. While schooling access for girls was severely restricted prior to the 2001 intervention, enrollment had climbed significantly by 2021, with nearly one million girls attending secondary schools across the country.
Jaberian added that much of that hard-fought momentum has now been entirely undone by the institutionalized framework implemented by the de facto authorities. Women face strict dress code regulations requiring garments that obscure the body, and regulations mandating that female travelers be accompanied by a male relative, or mahram, for long-distance journeys exceeding 72 kilometers or for boarding domestic and international flights.
The Human Toll: Trauma and Resistance Among Afghan Youth
The human cost of the exclusionary policies is starkly visible in the testimonies of survivors. Fatima Amiri was just 17 years old when a suicide bomber targeted her classroom in Kabul in 2022, killing over 50 of her peers and leaving her with life-changing injuries, including the loss of an eye and an ear.
“They are crying, they are sending me many messages and saying that we want the right [to] education,” she says. “They are in a very bad situation… the only thing they had was education, but right now they do not have it.”
Fatima Amiri, education advocate and survivor
Amiri, speaking before the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, described the psychological devastation experienced by young women confined to their homes. Beyond the school closures, up to seven million children overall remain out of class due to the ban and compounding crises, including recent earthquake disasters that relief agencies note have been severely complicated by the Taliban’s veto on female aid workers.
Preserving Pathways Through Community-Based Education
Despite the rigid prohibitions enforced at official institutions, international organizations and local communities are attempting to maintain alternative learning routes. UNESCO has sustained support for education inside Afghanistan by operating community-based education, literacy, and skills development initiatives.
These informal classes frequently operate within community spaces and inside the private homes of literacy facilitators, functioning with the knowledge of local authorities.
With UN agencies and partners such as Education Cannot Wait continuing to urge the international community to unite behind Afghan learners, advocates like Amiri call for concrete global action, including online learning opportunities and scholarships, to ensure that an entire generation is not permanently left behind.
