Ottawa, In August 2021, the Taliban recaptured Kabul and, within weeks, barred girls from attending school beyond Grade 6. The ban has not lifted.
About 2.2 million adolescent girls have been barred from secondary school for nearly 1,800 days. A 2026 UNICEF analysis projects Afghanistan will lose up to 20,000 women teachers and 5,400 health-care workers by 2030, with the restrictions already costing the country an estimated USD 84 million US a year. As recently as February 2026, girls were back on the streets of Kabul, still demanding education. As of June 2026, researchers at Georgetown University’s Institute for Women, Peace and Security counted 264 Taliban decrees affecting human rights since 2021, 166 of which specifically target women and girls.
But where protest has become too dangerous, Afghan women have built something quieter instead: informal networks of underground schools, run out of homes, that teach girls who would otherwise have no access to a classroom at all. Alongside protest and underground schooling, Afghan women’s organisations have also taken on documentation. At first, I didn’t understand what that meant. As a young student, I was excited about the cancellation of final exams, so I ran to tell my grandmother. Partway down a dark corridor, what it actually meant caught up with me: there would be no school next year. I sat down and cried. Friends of mine were not able to finish school and, as far as I know, were married off instead. I went on to become the first woman to serve as a director, then deputy minister, then acting minister of mines and petroleum in the Afghan cabinet.
