Five years of Taliban rule: millions of girls out of school - critical summary review

On August 15, 2021, the Taliban swept back into power in Afghanistan as United States and NATO troops completed their withdrawal after two decades of war. Five years later, Kabul is covered in white flags with black script and walls painted with slogans praising Islamic law. And the country remains, according to the UN cultural agency UNESCO, the only one in the world where girls and women are formally barred from secondary school and university.

The anniversary was meant to be a moment for accounting. Instead, a UNESCO survey released this week turned it into evidence of something else: the exclusion is not stalled, it is growing.

The number that keeps climbing

UNESCO counts 2.4 million Afghan girls shut out of secondary education. That figure is 200,000 higher than the agency's count a year earlier — meaning that in the twelve months when the world was preparing to assess five years of Taliban rule, another 200,000 girls crossed into the age bracket where school ends for them.

To grasp the scale of the reversal: in 2001, girls had very limited access to schooling in Afghanistan. By 2021, close to a million were enrolled in secondary education. "Afghanistan had made really major progress in expanding girls' access to education," said Hoda Jaberian, UNESCO's programme coordinator for education in emergencies. "But unfortunately, much of that progress now has been completely reversed."

Jaberian also framed what five years means for one student. "Five years is not a temporary interruption in a child's education," she said. "It is clearly almost an entire secondary school cycle."

How a "temporary" measure became permanent

The Taliban did not announce the ban on day one. Before the takeover, the group said publicly that when it came to power it would allow women access to education, employment and public life — in line with its own interpretation of Islamic principles.

What followed was incremental. Soon after seizing power, the Taliban imposed an indefinite ban on girls' education beyond the sixth grade. Secondary schools were closed to girls in March 2022. In December of that year, women were barred from universities "until further notice". Both measures were described as temporary. Both remain in force.

Around them, a wider set of restrictions accumulated: women were barred from gyms, parks, public baths and beauty salons, from taking part in sports, and from travelling long distances without a mahram, a male guardian. The Taliban also banned women from teaching boys — a measure the UN says stripped qualified staff out of the school system and left boys with untrained male teachers.

Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid has repeatedly said the administration is working to create conditions under which girls and women can return to classrooms and campuses in line with Sharia law. The UN agency for women's rights put it differently in a statement this week: "Half a decade after the Taliban takeover in August 2021, Afghanistan has systematically dismantled the rights of half its population, making it a global outlier with no parallel in the modern world." In the past year alone, it said, the exclusion of women and girls from education, employment, public life, justice and healthcare "has only intensified".

Four million by 2030, and the bill that comes with it

UNESCO's projection is the part that shifts this from a snapshot to a trajectory: if the ban stays in place, the number of girls denied secondary schooling could approach four million by 2030.

The agency also traces the effects forward. It estimates the exclusion of women from secondary and higher education could push around 600,000 women out of the workforce by 2066, with cumulative income losses of 9.6 billion US dollars and a heightened risk of early marriage. And because women cannot train as teachers or teach boys, the system is eating its own supply: UNESCO expects Afghanistan to face a shortfall of more than 11,000 qualified female teachers by 2030. "Many teachers have left the country and those who were in the system are banned from continuing teaching," Jaberian said.

It is not only about girls

The ban sits on top of an education system already in trouble for reasons that have nothing to do with gender — and that context matters, because it means restoring girls' access tomorrow would not, on its own, fix Afghan schooling.

More than two million primary-school-aged children are out of class for other reasons; UNESCO puts the share of primary-age children not in school at 53%. More than 90% of ten-year-olds cannot read a simple text, and the national literacy rate stands at 37%. Nearly half of schools lack water, sanitation or heating. Earthquakes, floods and other disasters have forced roughly a thousand schools to close since 2021.

The pressure is also demographic. Three million people returned to Afghanistan in 2025 alone, voluntarily or forcibly, and more than seven million have returned or been pushed back since 2023 — arriving in a system that already cannot seat the children it has. Separately, the UN World Food Programme says child malnutrition has reached critical levels in a third of Afghanistan's provinces and is expected to worsen as funding shortfalls cut food distributions.

"An internal matter"

The Taliban government has rejected calls to lift the ban, including from several Muslim-majority governments, describing the policy as a domestic affair. Molvi Hayatullah Mahajar Farahi, deputy minister for broadcasting at the Ministry of Information and Culture, told The Associated Press that the administration has delivered security, stabilised the currency, improved infrastructure and built industrial parks that created jobs. Asked directly, he did not address girls' and women's education, saying only that "the level of investment made in universities surpasses anything seen in the past".

On isolation, Farahi said the government engages with some 40 countries and has "fulfilled all the requirements necessary for official recognition. It is now up to the international community and others to step forward." Russia is the only country that formally recognises the Taliban administration.

The UN's own assessment is split. Its mission in Afghanistan, UNAMA, acknowledged before the anniversary that "a reduction in conflict has brought tangible benefits for many Afghans and created opportunities to focus on recovery, development and regional economic cooperation" — while warning that restrictions on women and girls block the country's recovery and its return to the international fold.

That split shows up in the street too. "Thank God, the past five years have passed in safety," Mohammad Qasim, 30, told the AP in Kabul, before asking the government to create jobs for young people and encourage them to study. Dost Mohammad Khan, 38, said the years had brought stability, then added that the country needs doctors and engineers: "We also call upon the Islamic Emirate to permit women to attend school under the Sharia dress code." Fazila Soroush, a 39-year-old Kabul entrepreneur and women's rights advocate, was blunter: officials who announced the closure of schools and universities "until further notice" should "now make a clear and practical decision regarding this matter".

What to do with this information

Two markers are worth following, and both are measurable rather than rhetorical.

The first is whether the international framing shifts. Right now the Taliban's position — that girls' schooling is an internal matter — has held, and no government beyond Russia has extended formal recognition either way. UNESCO's four-million-by-2030 projection is the test: watch whether foreign governments, including the Muslim-majority ones that have already objected, keep treating this as a diplomatic irritant or start attaching it to something with consequences. The annual UNESCO count, released around this time of year, is the simplest tracker there is — if next year's figure moves by roughly another 200,000, nothing has changed.

The second is money, and it is the more immediate of the two. Speaking from Kabul on Friday, Sarah Ferguson, special representative of the UN women's agency, said the agency is receiving only a quarter of what it needs and urged donors not to abandon Afghan women and girls. Of 74 Afghan women's organisations surveyed in April, more than half said they were close to suspending or halting work because of aid cuts. Those groups, along with the community-based classes and literacy programmes UNESCO says it still supports — often held in community spaces or in facilitators' homes — are what currently sits between the ban and total exclusion. If that funding keeps shrinking, the gap widens faster than any policy reversal could close it.

For anyone following from outside: the useful question over the next year is not whether the Taliban announces a change of policy, but whether the two numbers move — the count of girls excluded, and the share of funding reaching the organisations still teaching them.