A U.N. fund for children's education protested Afghan girls' inability to go to school on the Taliban's second anniversary of its takeover of Afghanisan.
Education Cannot Wait, the United Nations' global fund for education in emergencies and lengthy crises, said on Tuesday that Afghan girls are the "furthest behind" in efforts to erase poverty and reduce inequality.
The campaign is also timed to elevate Afghan girls' voices ahead of a U.N. summit in September on lagging efforts to achieve the 17 Sustainable Development Goals for 2030.
"It is hard to think of anyone further left behind than the girls in Afghanistan who are being denied their most basic human rights, including their right to education, based solely on their gender,” said ECW Executive Director Yasmine Sherif.
The Taliban-led government, which took over Afghanistan in the wake of the U.S. and NATO withdrawal from the country in 2021, severely restricted Afghan women and girls' rights and freedoms.
Under its repressive and discriminatory regime, girls are not allowed to go to school beyond the sixth grade and women are barred from holding nearly all jobs or entering public spaces.
Two years later, the Afghan economy remains cut off from the international community and nearly all of the nation's 42 million inhabitants live in poverty.
The Taliban's 'gender apartheid'
More than 28 million people need humanitarian assistance and almost 80% of those are women and children, according to Salma Ben Aissa, the International Rescue Committee’s Afghanistan director.
Humanitarian groups have delivered life-saving aid to some 17 million Afghans over the past year.
“Afghanistan has continued to suffer from a rapid economic collapse. Ordinary Afghans have paid the price; people who previously had jobs and were self-sufficient are now reliant on humanitarian aid and many families can no longer afford to feed themselves," Ben Aissa said.
"Funding cuts this year have led to the shutting down of basic health services," she said, "including in the form of mobile health teams resulting in hundreds of thousands of Afghans no longer being able to receive health and nutrition support – disproportionately affecting women and girls.
The Taliban violates a wide range of human rights two years since seizing power in Afghanistan and has put in place "a system of total discrimination, exclusion and subjugation of women and girls," according to dozens of U.N. experts.
"The hardest hit are women and girls, ethnic, religious and other minorities, people with disabilities, displaced persons, LGBTQ+ persons, human rights defenders and other civil society actors, journalists, artists, educators, and former government and security officials," they said.
The Taliban's systematic restrictions on the human rights of women and girls have suffocated all aspects of their lives and could amount to "gender apartheid," several experts reported last month to the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva.
