Five years after the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan, the country’s education crisis is becoming a wider threat to its social and economic future. Girls remain barred from school beyond the sixth grade, women are excluded from universities, and millions of children are receiving an education so weak that even attending school does not guarantee basic literacy or numeracy.
In an interview with Die Zeit, Daniel Timme, spokesperson for the UNICEF office in Kabul, described a deteriorating situation in which repeated Taliban promises to lift restrictions on girls’ education have produced no meaningful change. According to Timme, the consequences are extending well beyond the classroom, affecting child protection, mental health, healthcare and the country’s ability to recover from persistent poverty and natural disasters.
An estimated 2.6 million girls are currently affected by the prohibition on secondary education, and each year another cohort reaches the age at which they are excluded from school. The consequences are not limited to lost educational opportunities. Timme said schools in Afghanistan also function as protective environments, shielding children from exploitation through labour and helping protect girls from early marriage, sometimes before they reach the age of 15.
UNICEF staff working across Afghanistan are reporting increasing psychological pressures among girls, with suicide attempts also rising, according to Timme. The restrictions therefore affect not only educational development but the wider circumstances in which young Afghans grow up.
The consequences could become even more pronounced in the coming years. UNICEF has projected that if restrictions on the education of young women in schools and universities remain in place, Afghanistan could face a shortage of 20,000 female teachers by 2030. The health sector could simultaneously lack more than 5,000 nurses, female doctors, midwives and mobile healthcare workers who serve remote villages.
That shortage would have particular consequences in a country where, for traditional and religious reasons, women are treated by women. Timme warned that maternal and prenatal care would be particularly affected and that child mortality could consequently increase.
The education crisis is unfolding against an already severe humanitarian situation. Twenty-two million people in Afghanistan currently depend on humanitarian assistance, representing more than half the population. Almost 90 percent of children suffer from nutritional poverty, meaning that they do not receive sufficient or adequately balanced food for healthy development.
Afghanistan is also repeatedly exposed to natural disasters. In the past three years alone, three major earthquakes have killed thousands of people, while floods and droughts have repeatedly affected communities. Such disasters are harder for a population living in extreme poverty, with low levels of education and without a functioning health system to withstand.
Timme argued that there is little resilience to absorb these shocks. UNICEF’s experience elsewhere, including in Bangladesh, demonstrates the importance of investing in the education of women and children as part of efforts to tackle poverty.
UNICEF has repeatedly urged authorities in Kabul to lift the restrictions on education. The responses, according to Timme, remain evasive. Taliban officials continue to describe the restrictions as temporary and argue that they must remain in place until an education system has been created that conforms to what they regard as an Islamic way of life.
That system would separate boys and girls in schools and prevent young women and men from studying together at universities. But even if the prohibition were lifted, Timme said, Afghanistan’s education system would remain far from functioning properly.
More than two million children of primary-school age, both boys and girls, are currently not receiving education. The situation varies considerably between regions and population groups. Afghanistan faces shortages of teachers, while in some areas schools are simply too far away for children to attend. More than 1,000 schools have been so badly damaged by war and natural disasters that they remain closed.
Even among children who do attend school, the quality of learning remains deeply inadequate. A UNICEF study conducted a year ago found that more than 90 percent of children aged 10 could not read simple, age-appropriate texts. They could not write the simplest sentences or perform basic calculations. Particularly troubling, according to Timme, was that the problem affected children regardless of whether they attended school.
Afghanistan’s overall literacy rate remains among the lowest in the world, at an average of 37 percent. Only half of Afghan men can read and write, while the proportion among women is less than one-third.
The deterioration is not simply a consequence of the Taliban’s restrictions on girls. Although more children now attend primary school than during the period of the Taliban’s first rule, which ended in 2001, the quality of instruction remains poor. In many rural areas there are insufficient teaching and learning materials, while teachers themselves are inadequately trained.
The result is that children need to acquire basic skills before they can effectively progress to secondary education. At the same time, the number of boys attending secondary school has also fallen significantly over the past five years.
UNICEF and its partners are attempting to address some of these shortcomings through community-based schooling. Teams work in remote areas to train teachers, provide pupils with learning materials, pens, exercise books and books, and repair or establish classrooms. The objective is to ensure that children at least acquire basic skills in reading, writing and arithmetic.
For girls excluded from formal secondary education, alternatives exist but remain limited. Some receive instruction at home where families have the opportunity to provide it, while others participate in online courses. But these options are neither widespread nor capable of replacing a functioning national education system.
The suppression of women’s public activism has further narrowed the possibilities for challenging the restrictions. In the months after the Taliban takeover, women in Kabul repeatedly demonstrated publicly for their right to education and employment. According to Timme, such protests are now unthinkable because they are suppressed with extreme force.
The restrictions also intersect with attitudes towards women that predate the Taliban’s return. Even before the latest takeover, fewer than a quarter of Afghan girls attended secondary school, and only around 14 percent obtained a secondary-school qualification. Patriarchal attitudes remain widespread, while large sections of the population hold different views about the role of women.
For UNICEF, therefore, reopening secondary schools for girls is essential but cannot by itself resolve Afghanistan’s educational crisis. Timme argued that investment in primary education for both boys and girls remains equally important, helping to establish a stronger appreciation for education and preparing girls for the possibility that secondary schools may eventually reopen.
The distinction matters because lifting the formal prohibition would not automatically transform social attitudes or ensure that every Afghan family would send its daughters to secondary school. As Timme put it, believing that all families would suddenly do so if the Taliban lifted the ban tomorrow would be “illusory”.
The education crisis thus extends beyond the immediate question of whether Afghan girls will be allowed back into classrooms. The exclusion of millions of girls is simultaneously reducing the future pool of teachers, doctors, nurses and midwives, while weak primary education is leaving both boys and girls without essential skills.
Five years after the Taliban’s return, Afghanistan therefore faces a problem whose effects may persist long after any individual policy is changed. A generation is growing up with restricted educational opportunities, while the institutions needed to provide healthcare, education and resilience to future crises are losing the people they will need to function.
As the UNICEF assessment presented in Die Zeit makes clear, the country’s educational emergency is not confined to the girls currently barred from secondary school. It is becoming a structural problem affecting Afghanistan’s capacity to educate, care for and protect its population in the years ahead.
