Summary

Sixteen years after the US-led military intervention that ousted the Taliban government, an estimated two-thirds of Afghan girls do not go to school. And as security in the country has worsened, the progress that had been made toward the goal of getting all girls into school may be heading in reverse—a decline in girls’ education in Afghanistan.

Forty-one percent of all schools in Afghanistan do not have buildings. Many children live too far from the nearest school to be able to attend, which particularly affects girls. Girls are often kept at home due to harmful gender norms that do not value or permit their education.

The 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, though a direct response to the September 11 attacks on the United States, was partly framed as bringing assistance to the country’s women. Senior officials from troop-contributing nations in the early years of the war spoke out about the suffering of women under the Taliban.

Among the Taliban’s most systematic and destructive abuses against women was the denial of education. Before the Taliban came to power in 1996, Afghanistan’s education system had already been severely damaged during the country’s armed conflicts in the 1980s and 1990s. During their five-year rule, the Taliban prohibited almost all education for girls and women. So when Taliban rule collapsed in late 2001, the new government and the countries that had joined the US-led coalition faced two critical challenges: how to re-establish an education system for half the school-age population in a desperately poor country, and how to help girls and women who had been kept from getting an education during Taliban rule catch up on what they had been deprived.

The new Afghan government under then-President Hamid Karzai and its international donors approached these tasks with energy and resources. The government and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), with donor support, built schools, hired and trained teachers, and reached out to girls and their families to encourage them to attend school. The actual number of girls who, over time, went to school is disputed, but there is broad agreement that since 2001 millions of girls who would not have received any education under the Taliban now have had some schooling.

But this achievement is partial and fragile. Even according to the most optimistic figures regarding girls’ participation in education, there are millions of girls who never went to school, and many more who went to school only briefly. The impressive progress the government and its donors have made in getting girls to attend school was a good beginning, not a completed task.

This report examines the major barriers that remain in the quest to get all girls into school, and keep them there through secondary school. These include: discriminatory attitudes toward girls by both government officials and community members; child marriage; insecurity and violence stemming from both the escalating conflict and from general lawlessness, including attacks on education, military use of schools, abduction and kidnapping, acid attacks, and sexual harassment; poverty and child labor; a lack of schools in many areas; poor infrastructure and lack of supplies in schools; poor quality of instruction in schools; costs associated with education; lack of teachers, especially female teachers; administrative barriers including requirements for identification and transfer letters, and restrictions on when children can enroll; a failure to institutionalize and make sustainable community-based education; and corruption.

LAUNCH INTERACTIVE The war for girls' education in Afghanistan - 16 years after the US & allies toppled the Taliban and promised to get Afghan girls back into school, why are more than half of them still out of school?

Numbers

Statistics on the number of children in—and out of—school in Afghanistan vary significantly and are contested. Statistics of all kinds—even basic population data—are often difficult to obtain in Afghanistan and of questionable accuracy. A 2015 Afghan government report stated that more than 8 million children were in school, 39 percent of whom were girls. In December 2016, the minister of education announced that the real number of children in school was 6 million. In April 2017, a Ministry of Education official told Human Rights Watch that there are 9.3 million children in school, 39 percent of whom are girls. All of these figures are inflated by the government’s practice of counting a child as attending school until she or he has not attended for up to three years.

According to even the most optimistic statistics, the proportion of Afghan girls who are in school has never gone much above 50 percent. In January 2016 the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimated that 40 percent of all school-age children in Afghanistan do not attend school. Relying on Afghan government data from 2010-2011, UNICEF said that 66 percent of Afghan girls of lower secondary school age—12 to 15 years old—are out of school, compared to 40 percent of boys that age. In 2016, the US special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction wrote: “The MoE [Afghan Ministry of Education] acknowledged a large number of children are out of school, but is unaware of how many, who or where they are, or their backgrounds.” Donors eager to claim the success of their efforts may not be as skeptical about education statistics as they should be.

An accurate accounting of the number of girls in school matters, in part because high but inaccurate figures have given the impression that there is a continued positive trajectory when in fact deterioration is happening in at least some parts of the country. According to government statistics, while the number of children in school continued to increase through 2015, the increase has leveled off and become minimal since 2011, with only a 1 percent increase in 2015 over 2014. The World Bank reported that from 2011-12 to 2013-2014, attendance rates in lower primary school fell from 56 to 54 percent, with girls in rural areas most likely to be out of school. Government statistics indicate that in some provinces, the percentage of students who are girls is as low as 15 percent.

Analysis by the World Bank shows wide variation from province to province in the ratio of girls versus boys attending school, with the proportion of students who are girls falling in some provinces, such as Kandahar and Paktia. These disparities are mirrored in literacy statistics. In Afghanistan, only 37 percent of adolescent girls are literate, compared to 66 percent of adolescent boys. Among adult women, 19 percent are literate compared to 49 percent of adult men. Currently, as the overall security situation in the country worsens, schools close, and donors disengage, there are indications that access to education for girls in some parts of Afghanistan is in decline.

Despite the overall progress, Afghanistan’s provision of education still discriminates against women by providing fewer schools accessible to girls, and by failing to take adequate measures to remedy the disparity in educational participation between girls and boys.

Schooling in Afghanistan

The Afghan government has not taken meaningful steps toward implementing national legislation that makes education compulsory. Although by law all children are required to complete class nine, the government has neither the capacity to provide this level of education to all children nor a system to ensure that all children attend school. In practice, many children do not have any access to education, or, if they do have access to education, it does not extend through class nine.

Even when education is accessible, it is entirely up to parents to decide whether to send their children to school or not. The government has failed to make clear to families that school is important for all of their children and to ensure that the education system accommodates all students. The government’s failure to ensure that education is compulsory violates Afghanistan’s obligations under international law and is contrary to its international development commitments under the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Afghanistan’s primary and secondary education system consists of four main types of schools. Government schools are operated and staffed by the government, often with assistance from donors, much of which flows through the Ministry of Education. Community-based education (CBE) is a model that has been used to successfully reach many Afghan girls who would otherwise be denied education; it remains entirely outside the government education system and is wholly dependent on donor funding. Madrasas, schools devoted primarily to religious instruction, teach many children but often exclude core subjects in the government’s curriculum. Private schools exist as well, providing an option for some families that can afford fees, believe they will offer a higher quality of instruction, or are in a location where there is no government school.

Barriers to Girls Education Outside of the School System

Harmful gender norms mean that, in many families, boys’ education is prioritized over girls’, or girls’ education is seen as wholly undesirable or acceptable only for a few years before puberty. In a country where a third of girls marry before age 18, child marriage forces many girls out of education. Under Afghan law, the minimum age of marriage for girls is 16, or 15 with the permission of the girl’s father or a judge. In practice, the law is rarely enforced, so even earlier marriages occur. The consequences of child marriage are deeply harmful, and they include girls dropping out or being excluded from education. Other harms from child marriage include serious health risks—including death—to girls and their babies due to early pregnancy. Girls who marry as children are also more likely to be victims of domestic violence than women who marry later.

Poverty drives many children into paid or informal labor before they are even old enough to go to school. At least a quarter of Afghan children between ages 5 and 14 work for a living or to help their families, including 27 percent of 5 to 11-year-olds. Girls are most likely to work in carpet weaving or tailoring, but a significant number also engage in street work such as begging or selling small items on the street. Many more do house work in their family’s home. Many children, including girls, are employed in jobs that can result in illness, injury, or even death due to hazardous working conditions and poor enforcement of safety and health standards. Children in Afghanistan generally work long hours for little—or sometimes no—pay. Work forces children to combine the burdens of a job with education or forces them out of school altogether. Only half of Afghanistan’s child laborers attend school.

These challenges have been compounded by a security situation that has grown steadily worse in recent years. Armed conflict is escalating, with the Taliban now controlling or contesting over 40 percent of the country’s districts. The conflict affects every aspect of the lives of civilians, particularly those living in embattled areas. The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) has documented the rising impact of the war on civilians, including thousands of children who have been killed or injured.

For every child killed or injured in the conflict, there are many more deprived of education. Rising insecurity discourages families from letting their children leave home—and families usually have less tolerance for sending girls to school in insecure conditions than boys. The school that might previously have been seen as within walking distance becomes off-limits when parents fear that going there has become more dangerous.

The Taliban and other armed groups sometimes target girls’ schools, female students and their teachers for attack. Attacks on schools destroy precious school infrastructure. Interviewees told Human Rights Watch about bombings of schools, acid attacks against female students, and threats toward teachers—and a single attack can frighten hundreds of girls’ parents out of sending them for years to come. Both government security forces and Taliban fighters sometimes occupy schools, driving students away and making the school a military target.

Beyond the war, there is lawlessness, which means that on their way to school girls may also face unchecked crime and abuse including kidnapping and sexual harassment. There are increased reports of kidnapping—including of children—by criminal gangs. Like acid attacks, kidnappings have a broad impact, with a single kidnapping prompting many families in a community to keep children—especially girls—home.

Sexual harassment also presents a serious barrier to school attendance, as it is unchecked, difficult to prevent, and because of harmful gender norms can have damaging consequences for a girl’s reputation. Even when the distance to school is short, sexual harassment by boys and men along the way may force girls out of school. Families that were unsure about whether girls should study or not are easily swayed by rising insecurity into deciding it is better for girls to stay home and, often, to work instead of study.

Barriers to Girls’ Education Within the School System

A lack of schools and teachers, especially female teachers, means many girls simply do not have access to a school. Boys also face a lack of schools, but fewer schools accepting girls and greater restrictions on girls’ freedom of movement mean that girls are more deeply affected. Community-based education has allowed many girls who could not reach a school to have access to education, but without government support, this system is patchy and unsustainable.

Although government schools do not charge tuition, there are still costs for sending a child to school. Families of students at government schools are expected to provide supplies, which can include pens, pencils, notebooks, uniforms, and school bags. Many children also have to pay for at least some government textbooks. The government is responsible for supplying textbooks, but often books do not arrive on time, or there are shortages, perhaps in some cases due to theft or corruption. In these cases, children need to buy the books from a bookstore to keep up with their studies. These indirect costs are enough to keep many children from poor families out of school, especially girls, as families that can afford to send only some of their children often give preference to boys.

Overcrowding, lack of infrastructure and supplies, and weak oversight mean that children who do go to school may study in a tent with no textbook for only three hours a day. Even when schools have buildings, they are often overcrowded, with some children forced to study outside. Conditions are often poor, with buildings damaged and decrepit, and lacking furniture and supplies. Overcrowding—compounded by the demand for gender segregation—means that schools divide their days into two or three shifts, resulting in a school day too short to cover the full curriculum.

Thirty percent of Afghan government schools lack safe drinking water, and 60 percent do not have toilets. Girls who have commenced menstruation are particularly affected by poor toilet facilities. Without private gender-segregated toilets with running water, they face difficulties managing menstrual hygiene at school and are likely to stay home during menstruation, leading to gaps in their attendance that undermine academic achievement, and increase the risk of them dropping out of school entirely.

Many parents and students expressed dissatisfaction with the quality of teaching, and some students graduate with low literacy. Teachers face many challenges in delivering high quality education, including short school shifts, gaps in staffing, low salaries, and the impact that poor infrastructure, lack of supplies, and insecurity have on their own effectiveness. Teaching, which often pays under US$100 per month, is not necessarily seen as a desirable job, and people with limited education and training are often recruited as teachers. A lack of accountability can mean that teachers are frequently absent, and absent teachers may not be replaced.

There is a shortage of teachers overall, and the difficulty of getting teachers, especially female teachers, to go to rural areas has undermined efforts to expand access to school in rural areas, especially for girls. While the number of teaching positions grew annually in the years preceding 2013, it is now frozen. Seven out of 34 provinces have less than 10 percent female teachers, and in 17 provinces, less than 20 percent of the teachers are women. The shortage of female teachers has direct consequences for many girls who are kept out of school because their families will not accept their daughters being taught by a man. There is particular resistance to older girls being taught by male teachers.

Some government policies undermine the effort to get girls in school. Government schools typically have a number of documentation requirements, including government-issued identification, and official transfer letters for children moving from one school to another. While these requirements might seem routine, for families fleeing war, or surviving from one meal to the next, they can present an insurmountable obstacle that keeps children out of school. Restrictions on when children can register can drive families away, and policies excluding children who are late starting school constitute a de facto denial of education to many children. These barriers can be particularly harmful for girls, as discriminatory gender roles may mean that girls are more likely to lack identification, and to seek to enroll late and thus be affected by age restrictions and restrictions on enrolling mid-year. When families face difficulty obtaining the documentation necessary for a child to register or transfer, they may be less likely to go to great efforts to secure these documents for girls.

Afghanistan has well over a million internally displaced people, with more people being displaced all the time. Internally displaced families often face insurmountable barriers in obtaining the documentation they need to get their children into school in their new location. Families returning from other countries—often because of deportation—face similar challenges.

Community-based education programs (CBEs) are often an Afghan girl’s only chance at education. The opening of a nearby CBE can mean access to education for girls who would otherwise miss school, and research has demonstrated the effectiveness of CBEs at increasing enrollment and test scores, especially for girls. CBEs can be an effective strategy to tackle many of the systemic barriers to girls’ education, including the long distances to school, insecurity on the route to school, and the lack of female teachers, among others. However, to date CBEs are exclusively operated by NGOs and entirely funded by foreign donors. The absence of long-term strategic thinking by government and donors exposes CBE programs—and students—to unpredictable closures, which can compromise students’ educational future.

As Afghanistan’s school system struggles—and often fails—to meet the needs of students, there is very little extra support or access to education for children who have disabilities.

Regular government schools typically have no institutionalized capacity to provide inclusive education or assist children with disabilities. Children with disabilities who attend regular schools are unlikely to receive any special assistance. Only a few specialized schools for children with disabilities exist, and they are of limited scope. With no system to identify, assess, and meet the particular needs of children with disabilities, they often instead are kept home or simply fall out of education.

The corruption present in most Afghan institutions undermines the education sector as well, most markedly in the large bribes demanded of people seeking to become teachers. Afghanistan is ranked as one of the most corrupt countries in the world, and Afghans asked to name the three most corrupt institutions in Afghanistan listed the Ministry of Education third, out of 13 institutions. Corruption takes many forms in the education sector, including: corruption in the contracting and delivery of construction and renovation contracts; theft of supplies and equipment; theft of salaries; demand for bribes in return for teaching and other positions; demands for bribes in return for grades, registration of students, provision of documents, among other things; and “ghost school” and “ghost teachers”—schools and teachers that are funded but do not actually exist.

Donor Support to Education in Afghanistan

While Afghanistan has in recent years been one of the largest recipients in the world of donor funding, only between 2 and 6 percent of overseas development assistance has gone to the education sector. Bureaucratic hurdles, low capacity, corruption, and insecurity have contributed to even these funds often going unspent by the Afghan government. The government spends less on education than certain international standards recommend, as measured against gross domestic product (GDP) and the total national budget, reflecting in part how donors have allocated their funding.

In November 2016, donors and the Afghan government convened for the Brussels Conference on Afghanistan, where donors pledged US$15.2 billion in aid for Afghanistan over the next four years. The goal of the conference organizers was to sustain aid at or near current levels, and this figure was seen as representing an achievement of that goal.

Despite the large pledges made at the Brussels Conference, the overall outlook for aid in Afghanistan is downward. NGOs report that they are feeling the effects of reductions in funding, and this is already having an impact on the many girls studying outside the government’s education system. The impact on girls’ education could be even greater in the future, as government fixed costs—especially for security forces—take up a growing proportion of a declining aid budget.

Another change in donor funding that has affected girls occurred as international troops withdrew from many provinces in 2014, taking their funding with them. Under the system previously in place through the NATO military command, specific troop-contributing countries had security responsibility for each province, through a system of Provincial Reconstruction Teams. These countries typically invested in development aid, including for education, in the same province. As the troops drew down, the aid funding typically did as well. The result was that some provinces, particularly those that had been recipients of higher levels of aid funding, have already seen a steep decline in funds.

Legal Obligations

Education is a basic right enshrined in various international treaties ratified by Afghanistan, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Afghanistan has also ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), which includes an obligation to ensure women equal rights with men, including in the field of education.

Under international human rights law, everyone has a right to free, compulsory, primary education, free from discrimination. International law also provides that secondary education shall be generally available and accessible to all.

Governments should guarantee equality in access to education as well as education free from discrimination. The Afghan government has a positive obligation to remedy abuses that emanate from social and cultural practices. Human rights law also calls upon governments to address the legal and social subordination women and girls face in their families, provisions violated by Afghanistan’s tolerance of a disproportionate number of girls being excluded from school.

International law obligates governments to protect children from child marriage, and from performing work that is hazardous, interferes with a child’s education, or is harmful to the child’s health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral, or social development. Children with disabilities have a right to access to inclusive education, and to be able to access education on an equal basis with others in their communities.

In implementing their obligations on education, governments should be guided by four essential criteria: availability, accessibility, acceptability, and adaptability. Education should be available throughout the country, including by guaranteeing adequate and quality school infrastructure, and accessible to everyone on an equal basis. Moreover, the form and substance of education should be of acceptable quality and meet minimum educational standards, and the education provided should adapt to the needs of students with diverse social and cultural settings.

Governments should ensure functioning educational institutions and programs are available in sufficient quantity within their jurisdiction. Functioning education institutions should include buildings, sanitation facilities for both sexes, safe drinking water, trained teachers receiving domestically competitive salaries, teaching materials, and, where possible, facilities such as a library, computer facilities and information technology. It is widely understood that any meaningful effort to realize the right to education should make the quality of such education a core priority.

The Afghan government also has a legal obligation to take all appropriate legislative, administrative, social, and educational measures to protect children from all forms of physical and mental violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, and ma"ltr"eatment. Permitting the use of corporal punishment is inconsistent with this obligation.

In the past 16 years, the Afghan government and its international backers have made significant progress in getting girls into school. But serious obstacles are still keeping large numbers of girls out of school and there is a real risk that recent gains will be reversed.

It is therefore urgent that the Afghan government and international donors redouble their efforts to remove or mitigate the barriers to girls’ education enumerated in this report in order to guarantee girls’ right to primary and secondary education in Afghanistan.

A Note on the Title

In Afghanistan, there is a form of verse known as a landay or landai. Landays are short poems, written by women, and passed on from woman to woman orally. The authors are typically anonymous, and the oral tradition allows them to be shared regardless of whether those sharing them know how to read and write. The title of this report echoes a landay attributed to 15-year-old Lima Niazi:

You won’t allow me to go to school.

I won’t become a doctor.

Remember this:

One day you will be sick.[1]

Key Recommendations

To the Afghan Government

Take concrete steps, with international assistance, to realize the right to primary and secondary education and achieve Sustainable Development Goal target 4.1, to ensure that all girls and boys complete free, equitable, and quality primary and secondary education by 2030.

Gradually roll out compulsory education across the country, including through expanding access to education, public awareness strategies, plans for engaging community leaders, and systems for identifying and engaging out-of-school children and their families. Develop, and ensure compliance with, guidelines that require government schools to ensure that all children of compulsory school age enroll and complete at least lower secondary school. Promptly implement the National Action Plan to end child marriage, with the goal of ending all child marriage by 2030, as aimed for in Sustainable Development Goal target 5.3.

Strengthen the role of the province-level Child Protection Action Networks (CPANs) and give them responsibility for assisting all out-of-school children. Ensure that educators, communities and local government officials work with the local CPAN to protect the most vulnerable children, including out-of-school children, and children at risk of child marriage and child labor , and provide them with access to child protection services, where available.

Ensure teachers are provided domestically competitive salaries, commensurate with their roles, and provide financial incentives to encourage teachers, especially female teachers, to work in remote or under-served areas of the country.

Ensure that all newly constructed schools have adequate boundary walls, toilets, and access to safe water, and work promptly to install these in existing schools without them.

Ensure universal access to free primary and secondary education, by providing all needed school supplies, abolishing uniform requirements, reforming the system for providing textbooks, hiring and deploying more female teachers, and rehabilitating and building new schools.

Issue orders to all Afghan security forces, including the Afghan military, police, and pro-government militias to avoid use of schools for military purposes.

Methodology

This report is primarily based on research conducted in Afghanistan in May and July 2016. Human Rights Watch researchers carried out a total of 249 individual and group interviews, mainly in Balkh, Kabul, Kandahar, and Nangarhar provinces.

Most of the interviewees—a total of 134—were girls who had missed all or significant portions of their primary and secondary education. The majority of these girls were 11 to 18 years old. We also interviewed 31 boys who had missed significant portions of their education. In addition to interviewing children, we also interviewed parents, sometimes as part of an interview with a family group. The remainder of the interviews were with Afghan government officials, community leaders, donors, educators, and education experts. All research was conducted in Afghanistan except for three interviews with education experts outside the country.

Interviews with children were conducted at community-based education and vocational program sites, at schools, and in their homes. Whenever possible, interviews were conducted privately with only the interviewee, a Human Rights Watch researcher, and, where necessary, an interpreter present. Interviews were conducted in Dari, Pashtu, and, with some experts and officials, in English.

All interviewees were advised of the purpose of the research and how the information would be used. We explained the voluntary nature of the interview and that they could refuse to be interviewed, refuse to answer any question, and terminate the interview at any point. Some interviews were recorded, for later reference; all interviewees who were recorded were given the choice to refuse to have the interview recorded. Interviewees did not receive any compensation. The names of children and family members have been changed to pseudonyms to protect their privacy. The names of other interviewees have sometimes been withheld at their request.

We selected research sites in Kabul, Kandahar, Balkh, and Nangarhar with the goal of getting a sample of different experiences, including from internally displaced people, and hearing from people dealing with various levels of insecurity related to the war. Security challenges and transportation challenges also affected our choice of provinces and our ability to move within those provinces, and sometimes sharply limiting the amount of time we could spend at interview sites. Despite this, we were able to visit multiple sites in each province, including a number of rural areas outside city centers.

In this report, the terms “child” and “children” are used to refer to anyone under the age of 18, consistent with usage under international law.

At the time of the research for this report, the exchange rate was approximately 69 Afghanis=US$1. We have used this rate for conversions in the text. Afghanis are often referred to, including in quotes, as “Afs.”

I. Background

This is the era of education, so you should study. Illiteracy won’t cure anything—illiteracy is useless.

The 2001 invasion of Afghanistan by the United States and its allies following the September 11 attacks on the US was presented as a war in part to advance women’s rights. US and other leaders repeatedly cited the dire situation of Afghan women under Taliban rule as a justification for intervention.

Since taking power in Afghanistan in 1996, the Taliban had almost entirely shut girls out of education. After the defeat of the Taliban government in late 2001, rebuilding the education system for girls became a priority for the new government and its donors. Hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in getting girls into school, and ambitious plans were put forward to help women who had missed out on education to catch up.

A great deal was accomplished toward achieving these goals. Millions of girls who would have been denied education under the Taliban began going to school.

Number of Girls in School

The actual number of girls in school in Afghanistan has always been a loose estimate. Statistics of all kinds—even basic population data—are often difficult to obtain in Afghanistan and of questionable accuracy. A 2015 Afghan government report stated that more than 8 million children were in school, 39 percent of whom were girls. In December 2016, the minister of education announced that the number of children in school was 6 million. At times the Ministry of Education appears to have included in its count refugee children studying in Pakistan and Iran. In April 2017 an education ministry official told Human Rights Watch that 9.3 million children were in school, 39 percent of whom are girls. He also said that about 3.5 million children are out of school, about 85 percent of whom are girls.

However, some have found the government numbers of children in school to be suspect. In January 2016, the United Nations children’s agency, UNICEF, estimated that 40 percent of children in Afghanistan do not attend school. Relying on Afghan government data from 2010-2011, UNICEF also reported that 66 percent of Afghan girls of lower secondary school age—12 to 15 years old—are out of school, compared to 40 percent of boys that age. In 2016, the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction wrote: “The MoE [Ministry of Education] acknowledged a large number of children are out of school, but is unaware of how many, who or where they are, or their backgrounds.”

There are good reasons to be skeptical about the government’s numbers. The government does not stop counting children as being in school until they have not attended for three years because “they might return to school.” A 2015 investigation of 50 US-funded schools in seven provinces heavily affected by the conflict found not only that over 10 percent of the schools were not functioning, but that in those that were functioning, the number of students present was far smaller than the number the Ministry of Education listed as being enrolled—including a 40 percent over-counting of girls. The deputy minister of general education confirmed to Human Rights Watch that children continue to be counted as being in school for several years after they have dropped out; he asserted that this reflects the “need to give them the opportunity to come back” but also said that the government is looking at ways to improve data to “show who is not attending.”

Donor governments and inter-governmental organizations eager to claim the success of their support for education have not been as skeptical about government figures as they should have been, and now face significant challenges tracking how education funds were used. For example, in 2016, the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) issued a report reviewing US government spending between 2002 and 2014 on education in Afghanistan. The report called for better assessments of whether US government efforts “have led to improvements in education or increased stability in Afghanistan.” SIGAR also called on the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) “to acknowledge the source and reliability of data … and clearly explain whether there is a causal connection between USAID efforts and documented progress.”

A more accurate assessment of the number of girls in school matters, in part because overstated high numbers have helped give the impression that there is a continued positive trajectory, when in fact numbers are actually decreasing in some parts of the country. Even according to the most optimistic statistics, only slightly more than half of Afghan girls are in school. According to government statistics, while the number of children in school continued to increase through 2015, the rate of increase has leveled off and become minimal since 2011, with only a 1 percent increase in 2015 over 2014. When the number of children enrolled in school increases over time, a decline in the annual rate of increase in enrollment is understandable. However, with over 3.5 million children not attending school, a 1 percent rate of increase is insufficient to ensure that children are accessing their right to education.

The World Bank reported that between 2011 and 2013, attendance rates in lower primary school fell from 56 to 54 percent, with girls in rural areas most likely to be out of school. Government statistics indicate that in some provinces, the percentage of students who are girls is as low as 15 percent.

Throughout Afghanistan, only 37 percent of female youths and 19 percent of adult women are literate, compared to 66 percent of male youth and 49 percent of adult men. Analysis by the World Bank shows wide variation from province to province in the ratio of girls versus boys attending school, with the proportion of students who are girls falling in some provinces including Kandahar and Paktia. As the overall security situation worsens, schools close, and donors disengage, there are signs that access to education for girls in at least some parts of Afghanistan is in decline.

Government expenditure on education has fluctuated significantly in recent years, and remains low. According to certain international standards, the government should spend at least 15 to 20 percent of total national budget, and 4 to 6 percent of GDP, on education. As the United Nations noted, “[l]east developed countries need to reach or exceed the upper end of these benchmarks” if they are to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 4 to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all” by the target date of 2030. As of 2016, 13 percent of Afghanistan’s public expenditure, and 4 percent of GDP, was spent on education.

Compulsory Education in Afghanistan

The government should make all girls go to school.

Under Afghan law, intermediate (basic) education is compulsory, which means that students must attend until the end of class nine. However, the authorities have neither the capacity to provide this level of education to all children, nor a mechanism to enforce the requirement that all children attend school. They do not tell parents that they must send their children to school. In practice, many children do not have access to education or, if they do have access, it does not extend through class nine. Even when education is available, there is no government mechanism to seek out out-of-school children and enroll them, or to do outreach to children who drop out of school and their families. There are no consequences for families that do not send their children to school.

Armed conflict and lack of resources create real obstacles for the Afghan government in providing universal access to education. Deeply rooted, harmful gender norms mean that any efforts by the government to compel parents to send girls to school would be controversial, could lead to violence, and could have an impact on the government’s efforts to win support away from the Taliban. More importantly, the government has failed to send families the message that school is important for all of their children and to ensure that the education system accommodates all students.

Choice of Schools

There are four main types of school for children in Afghanistan: government schools, community-based education programs (commonly referred to as CBEs), religious schools or madrasas, and private schools. Families send children to different types of schools depending on the circumstances of the individual child, or the changing circumstances of the family, sometimes driven by changes in the family’s location, the impact of the conflict, and restrictions on girls’ education.

Government Schools

Afghan government data states that there are 14,658 government general education schools in the country. These schools use a government curriculum that is intended to be consistent across the country.

Most of Afghanistan’s schools, including government schools, are segregated by gender, with boys and girls studying separately, and virtually all studies from class ten on are separated by gender. Even when girls and boys study separately, however, the shortage of schools often result in girls and boys attending separate shifts at the same school. Only 16 percent of schools in Afghanistan are exclusively for girls.

Community-Based Education Programs

One of the major donor initiatives to try to get more children, especially girls, into school was the creation of community-based education programs (CBEs), which are funded through and operated by NGOs, with the expectation that the government provides oversight. These programs—often referred to as “classes” rather than schools, as they are often based in homes—frequently consist of a single class of 25 or 30 students. They are designed to provide access to education in communities where there is no school nearby. They are also intended to assist children who are behind in their studies, by accepting children who are too old to be admitted to government schools. Many CBEs offer an accelerated program of study, condensing two years’ worth of material into a single year, with the goal of helping children catch up so that they can go to a government school after completing a CBE.

CBE classes use the same curriculum as government schools, including the same textbooks. There is variety in the number of classes covered by these programs with some going through class six, but others ending after class three, four or five. Many CBEs give priority to holding classes for girls, and these classes are typically for girls only, and taught solely by female teachers.

Religious Education

Madrasas, which have limited oversight by government, provide a range of programs, from brief one-hour sessions focused solely on religious teaching to centers offering a school day as long that of a government school or a CBE, and covering religion plus secular educational subjects such as reading, writing, math, and science.

According to government statistics, there are 805 madrasas in the country, but this likely reflects only schools registered with and recognized by the government. Some educators believe the number of unregistered madrasas is much higher.

Few Afghan schools are fully secular. Afghanistan is an Islamic republic, not a secular state, and the official government curriculum used in both government schools and CBEs includes Islamic studies. But because many madrasas are unregistered and operate outside the government education system, they may not use the government curriculum, and children cannot necessarily easily transfer from a madrasa to a government school.

Private Schools

Afghanistan has a wide variety of private schools, from primary to the university level. Government statistics indicate that there are 1,051 general education private schools from primary through high school levels across the country. Some families who can afford it choose private schools that they believe are of better quality than government schools. Others choose private education because they live in areas where there is a private school but no government school.

The government is responsible for monitoring private schools, but this is complicated by some private schools not being formally registered.

Demand for Girls’ Education

If you are illiterate, you’re worthless.

When the US-led coalition ousted the Taliban in late 2001, some families were ready to send their daughters to school the next day. Some girls’ desire for an education was so strong that they went to multiple schools at the same time. Others needed more convincing.

“Even when the Taliban fell, people didn’t want to send their girls to school,” a long-time educator in Kandahar said. “We started CBE classes, and girls came slowly, but after [they completed the classes] families let them go to government schools.”

Educators said they have seen a change in the level of demand for education over time since 2001. “Fifteen years ago, no one wanted to send girls to school, but now especially in the north that has really … changed,” the director of an organization in Balkh said.

In Kandahar, the director of a training program said: “In general, the population’s attitude has completely changed.… They want the future to be better—they want education. They see that opportunities are available and they are interested.”

With increased demand has come the beginnings of stigma associated with not sending children to school. “There was a time when people would say it is better for a child to carry wood than to go to school,” said an Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) official. “Now a man will carry wood to pay fees for his child at school.”

Numerous education experts and government officials described a divide between urban and rural areas, with higher demand and greater access to education in urban areas. “Public awareness is succeeding,” one government education official said. “People are interested in enrolling their children, especially boys. For girls, we still have a problem. Parents send girls in cities.”

This divide is exacerbated by security problems related to the conflict, which are often worse outside cities, and by a related lack of government presence in and outreach to rural areas. Provincial education departments vary in the extent to which they have a presence in rural districts, and the central ministry may be even more insular.

For many families, moving from a village to a city changes their views on girls’ education. Gulpari, 14, moved from a village to Mazar-i Sharif when she was 10 years old, after her father got a job in the city. She is the oldest of six children; in the village, she did not attend school, and after the family moved to the city, her younger brothers were sent to school while she stayed home. When Gulpari was 12, however, a CBE opened nearby and her parents let her attend. Now they also pay for her to attend math classes at a private school and they support her dream of becoming a doctor. “When they came to the city they realized it’s good to get an education,” Gulpari said. “When they saw other girls going to school, they thought it was good. [In the village] there was a school at a far distance, but girls were not allowed to go—only boys were allowed. The government should make a lot of schools all around villages—people will come.”

Some families go to great lengths to obtain education for their children. Families interviewed for this report described moving from one neighborhood to another, from rural areas to the city, or even across several provinces, in search of access to a school.

Some families choose to separate when that is the only option to educate their children. Mujahida, 13, and her five sisters and two brothers all moved from Samangan to Mazar-i Sharif without their parents so that they could go to school, because the nearest school in Samangan was five or six villages away. They are looked after by a young cousin who is a high school student.

For families displaced from their homes, if their children can access education in the location to which they have been displaced, this may be a strong reason not to go home. “If the situation remains bad in our village, we will not leave Jalalabad,” a woman displaced from an ISIS-controlled area said. “We like it here because our girls can continue school easily.”

Rising insecurity and poverty may be eroding support for girls’ education. A survey conducted annually since 2006 found that the percentage of Afghans who agree or strongly agree with the statement “Women should have equal opportunities like men in education,” has declined from 91 percent in 2006 to 81 percent in 2016.

II. Barriers to Girls’ Education Outside the School System

Social Barriers, including Harmful Gender Norms

Communities think education makes girls immodest.

In spite of the demand for girls’ education, harmful gender norms still keep many girls out of school. Harmful gender norms also account for many of the barriers to education having a disproportionate impact on girls. For example, security concerns or distance are more likely to result in girls being kept out of school, families struggling to meet education costs may prioritize boys, it is often harder for girls to overcome administrative barriers, and lack of female teachers and infrastructure affect girls more.

Gender discrimination is deeply entrenched in Afghanistan, and some families simply do not believe that girls should go to school. Zahra, 15, was never allowed to go to school, even though her father is a teacher in a government school for boys. “The men in [this area] don’t like their daughters to go to school,” she said. “They think women are only for home chores, so they don’t let us go outside—we just stay home.” She added that there is often malicious gossip directed at girls who go to school and their families. “Relatives talk badly about you if you go to school,” she said. “They say it’s shameful that they let their daughter get an education.”

CBE programs, which often go door-to-door recruiting students, often experience this resistance. One CBE teacher in Kabul described a family living next door to the program; the father allowed his 16 and 17-year-old daughters to attend, but only if they climbed a ladder over the wall, so that none of the neighbors would know they were studying.

“Some parents say, ‘You can stay either in the house or in the grave,’” the manager of a CBE program in Jalalabad said.

In rural areas, where schools often remain inaccessible, attitudes are less likely to have changed. An official from the AIHRC said:

In most districts of provinces we work in, there is still a mentality that education of girls, especially after class nine, is unnecessary. There are many reasons for this. First, we are still burning in the flames of war, which prevents both boys and girls from going to school. We’re a society where many are denied the blessing of literacy. There is still a large number of mullahs who oppose the education of girls and create hurdles.… In the districts, there is still a large number of people who think that girls shouldn't study or work—they should stay home.

While girls in rural areas face particular challenges, Human Rights Watch also interviewed dozens of girls kept home from school in major cities, including Kabul. The reasons given for this included the idea that girls should not go to school at all, or should go only until they begin to physically mature. “My parents didn’t get an education, so they don’t want us to get it either,” said Kamella, 18, who attended school for five years in Kandahar city, but was forced by her family to quit at age 12.

There is often stigma attached to girls studying, and gossip contributed to many girls interviewed for this report leaving school. Fariba, 11, was the first girl in her family allowed to go to school. “I was crying a lot. I was asking my father and brothers to let me go and they decided to let me go,” she said. “I studied to class three. I got my class four books, but then I left because my parents said [people in] houses in the street are talking and saying, ‘Why does she go to school?’ I was 10,” Fariba said. “They took me out because our people are very bad people and they talked.”

“My younger daughter was very smart, but our people have a backwards mentality and kept passing remarks at me about sending my daughter to school,” said Asif, a 62-year-old father of five. “After a while, my daughter couldn’t bear to see me taunted like that, and quit school.”

Often a single family member has the power to decide whether girls will study. Nazira, 15, said her older sister was never allowed to go to school at all, and it was only luck that allowed her to get five years of schooling. “My elder uncle was alive then and he wouldn’t allow anyone to study. But he died, so I could go.” She was only allowed to go to class five, when she was 12, however, before her parents made her drop out.

Girls often described increasing family pressure to leave school as they grew older, due to discriminatory gender norms and greater restrictions on their movement as they approach puberty. Government statistics suggest this, with 2013 data showing that girls made up 41, 36, and 35 percent of students in lower primary, upper primary and lower secondary school, respectively. In Afghanistan’s universities, as of 2009, only 25 percent of students were women. “The higher you go, the more dropouts and the fewer girls,” an education official in Nangarhar said.

“My father said, ‘You are getting older—class eight is enough. You can just read letters and numbers—it’s enough for you,’” said Mary, 10, a CBE student in class three, explaining why she will have to leave school after class eight. “I want to finish class 12 and be a doctor,” she said. “But unfortunately, my parents won’t let me continue.”

A government official gave several reasons for the high dropout rates in the higher classes: a shortage of girls-only schools, parents’ reluctance to send girls to coed school, and a lack of female teachers.

Zarifa, 17, began her studies at a CBE in Kabul at age 7. After four years, she graduated from the CBE with 30 to 35 female classmates. She said that 20 to 25 out of the group transferred together to the closest government school, which is a 20 to 25-minute walk from her home; the CBE was five minutes away. For the girls who did not transfer, she said the distance was the main factor. She and her classmates found that they were academically well prepared when they started at the government school, but they faced other challenges. “Very few stayed,” Zarifa said. “Some married, some families didn’t allow them to continue, some had security problems.” She said the environment at the school was also difficult. “There are too many students—it is hard to manage them. There is a lack of chairs, of teachers, of classrooms. It is too crowded—some study in tents. There is a lack of books. At one time, I had no books.” Six years later, of the 20 to 25 classmates who transferred to the government school with Zarifa, only 8 to 10 remain. “I didn’t allow myself to be taken out,” Zarifa said. “I had promised to stay and finish.”

When girls are permitted to go to school, there is often a moment when their family decides that they are “too old” to continue. Gul Chehrah, 16, is a student in class four at a CBE. “I am supposed to go to class five, but my father is objecting,” she said. “First through class four was okay, but for five he says I am too old now. I would like to continue, but my father does not accept it.”

For some girls, the moment when their families deem them “too old” for school comes early. Roya, 15, was only 8 when her brothers made her leave school after she had attended for two years. “My brothers said, ‘You are grown up—leave the school.… Girls should not get education—it’s not necessary for girls,’” Roya said.

Some interviewees linked this moment when girls are forced to leave school to physical appearance or “becoming a woman.” Zahra, 15, whose father is a schoolteacher in a government school for boys, never went to school, but her younger sisters were allowed to attend before puberty. “My father said, ‘[w]e won’t let them grow up in school,’” she said. “When they reach the moment they become a woman my father won’t let them go. You become a woman at maybe 12 or 13.” Zahra’s 13-year-old sister has already been removed from school; Zahra thinks the 11-year-old has another year or two.

Others drew an explicit link with the onset of menstruation. “When you get your period, your family won’t let them go to school, because they are afraid they could be kidnapped or do something,” said Kamella, 18, who was forced to leave school at age 12.

Slower physical development may buy girls a bit longer in school. Freshta, 15, the oldest daughter in her family, was forced to leave school at age 13, but her 13-year-old sister is still studying. “They will let her continue even when she becomes an adult,” Freshta said. “They think she will not become an adult because she is not tall. I became tall and then was not allowed to continue school. Whenever one neighbor talks about us that we are grown and why is she going to school, we have to stop.” Freshta’s mother chimed in: “I agree with this rule, because when you are an adult you should take care of the house and your siblings.”

The view that girls should leave school at a certain age is sometimes linked to fears that if they are outside the home they may engage in romantic or sexual behavior. “There was a case of a girl running away with a teacher,” a journalist said. “As a result, a hundred girls were removed from school.”

Delara, 17, and her three older sisters were never allowed to go to school. She said her brothers fear that, “[w]e may be in love with a boy, and escape with someone. Our brothers also won’t allow us to use a phone, or wear hijab [with their face showing] instead of burqa [covering the whole face and body]. My brothers just think like this; we never did anything wrong.” She added: “It’s not for me to decide about my life.”

Parents typically expect to arrange their children’s marriages, so the possibility of a romance is seen as not only an issue of morality, but also a threat to parental control. Kamella, 18, said that she knew of three or four girls in her area who had eloped, and that this is a great fear of parents, “[b]ecause other people will use bad words for your family [if your daughter elopes] and in Kandahar girls are not allowed to select a husband for themselves. It is not changing—still girls marry whomever parents decide.”

Some family members, facing resistance from within the family, go to extraordinary lengths to send girls to school secretly. The mother and older brother of Lailuma, 12, wanted her to study, but her shopkeeper father refused. Three years ago, when a CBE opened nearby, the mother and brother secretly enrolled Lailuma without her father’s knowledge, and since then the whole family has worked together to keep it a secret from him that she spends spent half her day at a CBE. “It’s not possible for my sisters to go to school,” said Lailuma. “The oldest one, who is about 17, is engaged, and the younger one, about 9, cannot be trusted not to tell father.” Lailuma is now in class three, her last year at the CBE. “I’d like to go to class twelve,” Lailuma said, “But this is not possible because of my father.”

Hamida, 18, is the only girl in a family with five brothers. Her father, an auto mechanic, is so opposed to girls’ education that even when, at age 18, Hamida heard about a three-month sewing training program for women, she was able to attend only by hiding her participation from her father. “I cannot come when he is at home—only when he is working. I missed two days for that reason,” she said.

Child and Forced Marriage

In Afghanistan, 33 percent of girls marry before the age of 18. There is no data available on the percentage of girls who marry before the age of 15. Forced marriage of adult women also occurs with some frequency in Afghanistan. Under Afghan law, the minimum age of marriage for girls is 16, or 15 with the permission of the girl’s father or a judge, while boys must wait until they are 18 to marry. The law’s different treatment of males and females violates international law on child marriage. In practice the law is rarely enforced, so even earlier marriages are likely.

Yalda married one year after she began menstruating; she estimates that she was about age 13. Her husband was 75; she was his second wife. She is unsure of her current age, but has six children, the oldest an 8-year-old. She never went to school.

The consequences of child marriage are deeply harmful, and they include girls dropping out or being excluded from education. Other harms from child marriage include serious health risks—including death—to girls and their babies due to early pregnancy. Girls who marry as children are also more likely to be victims of domestic violence than women who marry later.

Zubaida, 13, has three older sisters, none of whom went to school. “My sisters were very young when they got married—that’s why they didn’t go to school,” Zubaida said. The eldest sister married at 14. Zubaida is unsure what the ages of marriage were for her second and third oldest sisters, but she said her third sister was particularly young. “When she was pregnant we took her to the doctor and he complained: ‘How could parents get a girl married this young?’” Zubaida is in class three and says she hopes to be able to delay marriage and become a doctor. “When someone comes to ask to marry me, my father says, ‘No, I don’t want to marry her—she’s too young. I married my other daughters early, and they faced a lot of problems during pregnancy, so I don’t want to get my two remaining daughters married early.”

Being out of school puts girls at heightened risk of child marriage. Afghan government data indicates that girls who did not study are three times as likely to marry before age 18 as girls who completed secondary education or higher. And that lack of access to education is a major driver of child marriage. Masooma said she was never allowed to go to school because of security problems—instead she married young. It was unclear how old she was when she married, but when Human Rights Watch interviewed her, she said she was 22 years old and the mother of five children.

While there is no legal prohibition on married girls attending school, in reality they are rarely able to do so. Domestic work, pregnancy and childrearing, and restrictions on the movement of women and girls mean that few in-laws are prepared to have married girls continue studying. “About 10 girls a year marry,” a high school teacher told Human Rights Watch, referring to his school where there were 800 students in classes one through twelve. “When they get married they are not allowed to go to school.”

Palwasha, 16, was a student in class three at a CBE program in Mazar-i Sharif when she spoke to Human Rights Watch. “When I finish class four, I want to go to a government school. At least that’s my plan. But I am engaged and I don’t know if I will be allowed by my in-laws to go to school,” she said. Her engagement was three months before Human Rights Watch interviewed her in July 2016, and she expected the wedding to be in the following month or two. “My husband said he will allow me to continue my education, but I’m afraid my in-laws might not allow me. They said, ‘Nobody in our family went to school, so you shouldn’t study either.’ I told them, ‘No problem, I will do what you say.’ I told them that, but I am very interested in continuing my education. My husband supports my education, but he can never disobey his parents.”

Poverty both keeps many girls out of school and encourages child marriage. Tarana, 18, is the oldest girl in her family. She was never able to go to school, in part because her father was killed in a bombing when she was 15. After his death, the family faced financial problems, and Tarana was married to her cousin at age 15. She was pregnant when Human Rights Watch interviewed her. Her sister, however, just a year younger, started studying at age 13 or 14 and is still studying at a government school at age 17. Their 12-year-old sister also goes to government school. “I had expected to go to school,” Tarana said. “But because of financial difficulties after my father was killed, I couldn’t. Now my sisters are getting an education.”

Monira, 40, lost both her husband and her son in an accident, and she is now in the uncomfortable position of living with and being financially dependent on her dead husband’s family. She said she was unable to send her two daughters, ages 13 and 15, to school “because we have no money.” The 15-year-old is married, and the 13-year-old is engaged. Both girls and their mother are now in a class to learn sewing skills, in hopes of finding a way to provide for themselves.

A child marriage by one girl in a family can result in another girl having to leave school to take over the married girl’s work. Chehrah’s sister was engaged at birth to a cousin. At age 16, the marriage took place. Chehrah, then 12, had been studying but her father made her leave school as her mother now needed her to replace her sister doing housework.

Even when the marriage itself is deferred, an engagement is often enough to force a girl out of school. Gulnaz’s sister’s wedding won’t take place for five more years, but her sister had to leave school as soon as she was engaged at age 16. “My second oldest sister went to school until class six before she got engaged and had to stop,” said Samira, 11.

One form of arranged marriage practiced in Afghanistan, which often involves child marriage, is an exchange of brides called “badal.” Several girls told Human Rights Watch that they had sisters who had been engaged at young ages through badal arrangements—for example, one girl was engaged at age 2, and married at age 9; another was engaged at 8 and married at 11. These early engagements may lead to girls being kept out of school even while their sisters study.

Even the anticipation of marriage in the future is sometimes an excuse to end a girl’s education. Chehrah is 16 years old. Her 18-year-old brother is the person who decided that Chehrah should leave school after class four and her older sister should never go to school. “You’re girls, and I am a boy,” Chehrah said he told them. “Tomorrow you will get married and bear children, so what are you doing with school?”

It is common—and, in some families, considered desirable—for relatives, including first cousins to marry. The desire to arrange such a marriage can affect the age at which girls marry. Naiema married her cousin when she was 15. “My father decided to get me married to him because he was the only boy in our family,” Naiema said. “My father wanted me to marry in the family. He forced it on me.” She was widowed at age 16, after her husband suffered what she said was a neurological problem as he journeyed to Iran to seek work. When Human Rights Watch interviewed Naiema, she was 19, and in class three at a CBE. “I was very interested to study when I was very young, and after my husband died my father moved us to Mazar so I could get an education—so I got my dream.”

Many of the girls interviewed for this report had moved or been displaced, sometimes leading to changes in the family’s practices regarding child marriage. Nasrin grew up in rural Helmand province, but her family fled worsening security and came to Kandahar. Nasrin’s older sisters all married at ages 16 or 17, but at 18 Nasrin was still unmarried. “Before, we were in Helmand, and now we are in Kandahar, and the situation is different,” she explained. “The people who live in villages do their marriage early, but now we live in the city. In Kandahar city, girls get married later.” Nasrin and her older sisters never studied in Helmand, but in Kandahar one of their younger sisters is studying.

For some girls, the possibility that a forced marriage could threaten their education is a source of anxiety. Homa was only able to begin her studies when she was 12 years old, because as the oldest daughter she had to work to pay the education costs for her younger siblings. At age 14, she is excited about her studies and dreams of going from CBE to government school, to university and becoming a doctor. But she is afraid marriage will put an end to her education. “I am so interested to get an education—I am struggling,” she said. “But I can’t say anything about my father—he might engage me to someone and I might get married. I am trying to reach 19, but I think my father will have me married at 18.”

Ministry of Education officials said they were concerned about child marriage, and an official in Nangarhar said that the government is trying to develop a pilot education program for girls in three districts in that province that they have identified as having both low girls’ education participation and high rates of child marriage. In April 2017, the Afghan government launched a national plan to end child marriage. But given the government’s poor track record of implementing laws and policies designed to protect the rights of women and girls, there is reason for skepticism about the likely impact of these efforts.

Poverty

Poverty is a major barrier to education in Afghanistan. The World Bank reports that in Afghanistan 62 percent of non-poor children go to school, but only 48 percent of poor children do. Between 2011-12 and 2013-14, the percentage of non-poor children attending school rose by 1.8 percent, but the percentage of poor children studying fell by 6 percent. This is a crucial barrier, as Afghanistan remains one of the poorest countries in the world, and poverty is increasing.

Some families told Human Rights Watch that they cannot afford even the most basic school supplies. Others keep their children out of school so that they can work, because the family is financially dependent on children’s earnings. Some children do not go to school because their families are barely surviving and they are too hungry to study.

A community leader from an informal settlement in Kabul of Kuchi people, who were formerly nomadic, explained why in his community few children go to school:

We sell fruit for 20-30 Afs [US 29-43 cents]. The kids here run around the market and eat peels from the ground. We are destitute. All the kids are illiterate.… Should they take care of food, or education?… If your stomach is empty, you can’t go to school.

He has five or six grandchildren living in the settlement, none of whom go to school.

Displacement can compound poverty, leaving parents in such crisis as they try to survive day-to-day that they feel unable to cope with trying to get their children to school. Ahmad and his extended family, including his six children, arrived in Mazar-i Sharif in 2013, after fleeing an area of Balkh province where he said the Taliban had killed people and there was fighting between the Taliban and government forces. His oldest children, now ages 15 and 13, went to school there, but all of the children have been out of school since they fled their home.

Aside from meeting the essential costs of sending children to school, stigma and shame also contribute to keeping poor children out of school. “Poor people face mental problems during study, because their clothes are not new and they don’t have new bags and they will feel ashamed to go to school,” said Fawzia, who missed school until she was 14.

Girls are often the first to be pushed out of school by poverty. Families that struggle to scrape together enough money for only some of their children to attend school are likely to send boys, not girls. When economic circumstances require that mothers work, daughters —not sons—are the ones likely to be kept home to do housework.

When children are put to work for wages because of economic desperation, girls can do carpet weaving, tailoring or embroidery in the home and their education is seen as more expendable than boys’. In addition to harmful gender norms, there are also economic reasons for prioritizing boys’ education; daughters who marry normally go to live with, and contribute to, their husband’s family, while sons often remain with their parents, so sending them to school is an investment in the family’s economic future in a way that educating a girl is not.

Child Labor

Afghanistan’s deep poverty results in widespread child labor. At least a quarter of Afghan children between ages 5 and 14 work for a living or to help their families, including 27 percent of 5 to 11-year-olds. Many are employed in jobs that can result in illness, injury, or even death due to hazardous working conditions and poor enforcement of safety and health standards.

Children in Afghanistan generally work long hours for little—or sometimes no—pay. Paid jobs done by children include: home-based carpet-making, embroidery, or tailoring; bonded labor in brick kilns; in the metal industry as tinsmiths and welders; in mines; in agriculture; and on the streets as vendors, shoe shiners, and beggars. Other children work doing housework or work on their families’ land. Work forces children to combine the burdens of a job with education or forces them out of school altogether. Only half of Afghanistan’s child laborers attend school.

Among 5 to 11-year-olds, similar numbers of girls and boys work (25 percent versus 29 percent). At ages 12 to 14, this gap widens to 18 percent versus 26 percent, because girls’ ability to work outside the home is often restricted as they approach puberty. Girls are most likely to work in carpet weaving or tailoring, but a significant number also engage in street work, such as begging or selling items on the street.

Afghanistan has laws to prevent harmful child labor but they are rarely enforced. Under Afghanistan’s Labor Law, 18 is the minimum age for employment. Children between the ages of 15-17 are allowed to work only if the work is not harmful to them, requires less than 35 hours a week, and represents a form of vocational training. Children 14 and younger are not allowed to work at all.

“Some parents want to schedule school so that their kids can work,” a CBE provider in Kabul said. She said that at her CBE, working children are especially common among internally displaced and returnee families, due to the desperate economic situation of many of these families. She estimated that five or six years ago, about 85 percent of the children in the school worked, but she said the local community’s economic situation had improved over time, as displaced families have found their bearings, and that number was now down to about 30 to 35 percent.

Paid Labor

Many girls said that they began working, usually making carpets, embroidering or sewing, around age 7. “I’ve been making carpets for six years,” said Zainab, 13, who makes carpets with her three sisters. Their father initially refused to let them study because he wanted them to work full-time. He was convinced to let them study when a CBE opened near their house, but they weave carpets in the morning before school and in the evenings after they come home. “We get paid 2,200 Afs per meter [US$32],” Zainab said.

Some girls are the sole wage earner for their families. Wahida, 16, has four older sisters. Their father is mostly blind after being injured in a mine explosion and their mother is ill. Wahida was never sent to school. Wahida’s 17-year-old sister became the fourth to marry last year, leaving a household consisting of Wahida, her parents and four younger siblings. Wahida works as a seamstress, earning 600 to 900 Afghanis a month [$9-$13] stitching sets of traditional clothing. “I am the only one earning,” she said.

Being the family’s wage earner can put children under enormous pressure. Shakila, 14, fought to go to CBE, where she is in class three, but she has missed many classes. “My father is sick and cannot work anymore,” she said. “He wants me to work.” She said her father arranged for her and her 11-year-old brother to weave carpets at home.

When we wove carpets, there was too much pressure. I got sick. I had headaches and my arms and legs felt limp. When we finished our first carpet, my part of the weaving was done well, but my brother’s was not done well enough, so we didn’t get paid for our work.

Many children combine work and school, often resulting in a grueling schedule. Bibi Gul, 16, cleans three kilograms of peas for a shopkeeper for three hours every morning before she goes to school at a CBE. She and her younger brother and sister came to live with their older brother and his two wives and one child after their parents died. “I help with the economy,” Bibi Gul said. “I do it to help my younger sister buy pens, and so on, for school.” She is the eighth child out of 10 and the first to go to school.

Occasionally the greater ability of boys to work outside of the home leads to a girl having more opportunity than their brothers to study. Farzana, 11, is one of seven children, and the only one to go to school. Her oldest brother has a paid job and the younger ones, ages 10 and up, look after the family’s sheep. “I am the youngest girl, so I am allowed to go to school,” Farzana said.

Domestic Work and Work for the Family

Often the oldest daughter in the family bears the brunt of domestic work, frequently missing education as a result. “I’m the oldest girl—that’s why I didn’t go to school,” said Wazhma, 13. She has five brothers and two sisters, all younger except one brother. “There was no one at home,” Wazhma said. “I had to prepare the food and clothes. All my siblings went to school except me. My family said they will go to school and you have to stay home to do cleaning and other chores.”

Girls are sometimes kept home to help their mothers because the family is so large that housework requires more than one person. Other girls are kept home because their mothers are ill or have a disability. “My siblings started studying in Dast-i Barchi,” said Arzo, 16, referring to a neighborhood in Kabul where the family lived for four years after moving from Maidan Wardak province, where none of the six children had attended school. “I’m the oldest. I’m the only one who didn’t go to school. My mother was sick and she said I should do the house chores,” Arzo said. At age 14, Arzo finally had a chance to go school, after a CBE opened in the family’s neighborhood and the staff visited their house and convinced Arzo’s parents to send her.

Lina’s mother has a physical disability from stepping on a mine as a child that limits her mobility. Lina said her mother is impaired by grieving for her oldest son, who fell from the roof and died as the family was building their current home. She receives little help from Lina’s father, who uses drugs. Lina, 12, and her older sister began studying in 2015, but after a year the housework became too much for their mother. Lina was allowed to continue studying but her sister left school to do the housework.

In some families where the mother works outside the home, the eldest girl is expected to take her place doing the housework, at the cost of the daughter’s education. Safia’s father worked pushing a cart, but did not earn enough to support his five children, so Safia’s mother found work as a cook. Safia, then 7, became responsible for caring for her brothers, ages one year and three months at the time. “Our income was weak,” Safia, now 15, said. “If my father had work, my mother wouldn’t have gone to work. I wouldn’t have had to look after my brothers, and I could have gone to school.” Safia’s younger sister went to school and graduated, and her younger brothers are studying. Her older brother married and with his wife helping with the housework Safia, at 13, was given a chance to study when a CBE opened nearby.

Impact of the War on Girls’ Access to Education

The Taliban is near our house. If we go to school they will kill us. If the government can provide security, we will be very interested to go to school.

Insecurity has dramatically undermined access to education for girls. UNAMA, the UN mission in Afghanistan, began tracking civilian casualties in 2009; every year since then the number of casualties documented has topped the previous year. In 2016, the figure was 11,418 civilian casualties (3,498 deaths and 7,920 injured), a 3 percent increase in total civilian casualties compared to 2015. In total, since 2009, the UN has documented 24,841 civilian deaths and 45,347 civilians injured.

Children make up large numbers of civilian casualties; in 2016, for example, 923 deaths and 2,589 injuries were of children, a 24 percent increase from 2015. For every child killed or injured in the conflict, many others are deprived of education. Escalating insecurity encourages families to keep their children at home—and families usually have less tolerance for sending girls to school in insecure conditions than boys. The school that previously might have been seen as within walking distance becomes off-limits when parents fear that the journey is becoming more dangerous. Alongside the war, there is a lack of rule of law stemming from the conflict, which means that girls on the way to school may also face unchecked crime and abuse including kidnapping and sexual harassment.

“Now families are very inclined to send girls to school, but there are a lot of security problems,” a CBE staff member in Kandahar said. “Even girls here [at a CBE] get threats.” She continued, “People’s attitudes [to education] have brightened up, but the security environment doesn’t always allow it.”

“We studied until the war started and then school stopped,” said Raihana, age 14 or 15, whose family, including her five siblings, fled to Kabul from Maidan Wardak. She said her family’s home and land were burned by the Taliban. For the first two years after they fled, all the children were out of school, because there were no schools near the informal settlement for internally displaced people where the family lived.

Despite the insecurity, many children and families are still demanding education, and make efforts to negotiate with combatants to secure that. A Ministry of Education official explained: “[t]he political situation—the fighting, the insurgency—affects all of life, but people need to be supported. For example, in Wardak there is fighting, but kids go to school. The community tells the insurgents, ‘You can have whatever problems with the government, but our children need to continue their education regardless.’” The government and donors need strategies to maximize the extent to which children, including girls, can keep studying even amid war.

When security worsens, one of the first consequences is often girls losing access to education. Families often clamp down first on girls going to school, even while boys continue to attend. “In Samangan, there was fighting in our area,” said Shakila, 14. “So although boys were allowed to go to school, my father didn’t allow me to go.”

Mahfoozah is a 19-year-old from Kandahar. Her brothers went to school; she and her sisters did not. “My family was worried about security,” Mahfoozah said, “[b]ut they also think only boys need school. If security was not an issue, they might have let me go to school. From when I was small I wanted to go to school. I tried so many times to convince them.”

“When there is security everything is well and families are happy to send girls to school,” the director of an education program in Kandahar said. “But without security it’s not possible. In the last two years, students are leaving schools because of security problems.” She pointed out the links between insecurity and economic hardship, both of which drive girls out of school. “Things are getting worse now.…There are no jobs for people, there is insecurity in many places, the cost of materials is getting higher—but most important is no jobs.… We used to work in four districts [in Kandahar]—now we don’t feel secure even in the center of the capital.”

The arrival of Taliban forces in an area drives many girls out of school. “The Taliban came to our area,” said Amina, 16, whose family fled to Mazar-i Sharif from Baghlan province. “We fled when the fighting started and the Taliban took over our area, looted our house, and took away our cows and livestock. Even before the Taliban takeover, [our area] was insecure, so we didn’t go to school. If girls were on the way to school, Taliban would shoot at them from afar. This happened for the last three years we were there, so I stayed home and wove carpets. Nobody, boys or girls, could move about freely in our area.”

Some families said that they had been able to educate their children, with difficulty, under Taliban control. When government forces sought to expel the Taliban, however, fighting erupted, driving children out of school and eventually causing families to flee. “Security was bad during the Taliban, but it was worse after the Taliban,” a mother from Kunar said. She described repeated drone strikes in their area, as well as bombs and shooting, as the government fought the Taliban. For over two years, she said, she kept her children at home. The family finally fled to Jalalabad when lack of work left them without food. There their children, girls and boys, resumed schooling.

For some, the insecurity that came with the Taliban made girls’ education impossible. “Even if the Taliban allows girls to study to class four, we didn’t want to send them because of bad security,” one of a group of mothers who had fled from a Taliban-occupied area of Nangarhar said. They described multiple incidents of family members being kidnapped and murdered—or arrested on suspicion of Taliban activity.

The presence of the Taliban may lead teachers to flee, leaving children with a school that is just an empty shell. Sitara, 13, from the province of Kapisa said that fighting often kept teachers away from the school. “Some kids did go to school, but there were no lessons and no teacher,” she said. “Kids just went and made noise and played and after a while families stopped them going. Teachers didn’t go because of the Taliban.”

Other families faced danger from ISIS-affiliated armed groups. A doctor from an ISIS-controlled area of Nangarhar province described moving his family to a different neighbor’s house every night for weeks on end, after the family narrowly escaped a bomb planted outside their home. “It was hard for them in the morning to go to school if they are moving from house to house and staying up much of the night to keep checking on the gate like they are the police guarding the house. So we decided to move.” The family fled to Jalalabad, where he was able to enroll his children in school without difficulty. “I don’t know why they targeted us,” he said. “Maybe because they want educated people out.”

Some displaced families were so traumatized and overwhelmed that education was no longer a priority. Homa was one of 22 family members who fled their home in Baghlan province in May 2016 and sought safety in Mazar-i Sharif. “The fighting started in the evening and we all ran with no shoes on our feet and no veils on our heads, running from this place,” she said. Because of insecurity, none of the family’s girls had attended school in Baghlan. In the last year even the boys had been driven out of school. “Rockets flew over our heads,” one boy said. “For this year, we barely went [to school] two weeks.” When asked whether the children would attend school in Mazar-i Sharif, one of the women said: “No, no, no. We can’t even find food to eat—why would we go to school?”

Attacks on Education

In 2016, UNAMA documented 94 incidents in which education was specifically targeted or affected, which resulted in 91 civilian casualties (24 deaths and 67 injuries). This included 13 incidents of targeted killing, and 12 incidents of abduction involving 55 students and education-related personnel. There were also 10 incidents of intentional damage to education property, and five incidents of improvised explosive devices targeting education. Among the dead was a teacher from a girls’ school who was shot, and the headmaster of a girls’ school who was abducted.

Both the Taliban and ISIS have opposed girls’ access to education, and have been responsible for many attacks on education, particularly girls’ education.

“The Taliban didn’t let girls study,” said Maliha, 14, who fled with her family from Wardak to Kabul. “They closed the girls’ schools, and then there were no girls’ schools.”

Women and girls living in areas controlled by groups affiliated with ISIS described restrictions so severe that they could not leave their homes, let alone go to school. “ISIS made women sit in the home—if you go out they will kidnap you,” said a woman who fled an area of Nangarhar infi"ltr"ated by such groups, adding that many women in her community had been kidnapped by ISIS.

Government and nongovernmental education providers as well as communities have negotiated with insurgent groups to try to protect education for girls. Najia is a mother of 10 children and is from an area of Nangarhar where the Taliban was displaced by groups affiliated with ISIS. When the Taliban were in control, she said the community was able to negotiate. She said that when the Taliban first came to the area in 2010 or 2011 they posted letters demanding that the girls’ school be closed completely, but the people of the village argued that education of girls through class eight should be permitted, and the Taliban agreed to this and honored that agreement.

In another district of the same province, however, a group of mothers said that the Taliban had agreed to girls attending school only through class four, a restriction they enforced by sending warning letters to the homes of girls in school.

In some cases, schools are directly attacked. “The Taliban didn’t allow girls to go to school,” said Shakila, 14, talking about her home village in Samangan province:

Maybe three or four years ago, the Taliban attacked the school. Some classes were in session. The students were unharmed, but five or six teachers were injured. Some of them now have disabilities, and two were killed. The school itself was burned. After this, our elders didn’t dare reopen the school, and it closed permanently. I had just started class one and had only been to school for a few weeks when my parents pulled me out for security reasons. Then the attack happened.

Insurgents sometimes directly explain that their attacks are in opposition to girls’ education. “There were two bombs in the school,” said 16-year-old Malalai, describing an attack in January 2016, against the girls’ school near her home in Nangarhar province. She said there was a letter from the Taliban left in the yard of the school at the time of the bombing: “They said they put the bomb because you have to stop sending your girls to school.” The windows of the school were blown out and there was some other minor damage, but the school reopened after 12 days. None of the girls from Malalai’s family had ever been allowed to go to that school, however. “My father loves education, and he wants girls to study, but he says with this security situation it’s not possible,” Malalai said. She said that her cousins who attend the targeted school told her that the principal has also received several threatening “night letters.”

Some schools face violence because of their proximity to other civilian structures frequently targeted, such as government offices. “One day we were at school and studying and there was a bomb blast in front of the school, because it was near a government office,” said Kamella, 18. “All the girls and all the parents were very scared.” Kamella’s family forced her to quit school after the blast.

Insurgents often use threats to force schools to close. Najia, a mother of 10 who fled her home in Kot district in Nangarhar province, described the situation in Kot: “ISIS put letters in the mosque and inside the school at night—they said, ‘We are stopping the school—not even small boys can go,’” she said. “They also put letters to the teachers saying give your salary to us. They said, ‘Don’t go to school and do teaching. If we hear you’re going for teaching we will kill you.’” She said the local madrasa was also closed, and that villagers found a bomb near the school and called the police, but before the police arrived it exploded. Najia and others from her village said that groups affiliated with ISIS had also threatened teachers, ordering them not to go to school to teach, and had demanded that teachers hand over their salaries to them. Before these groups arrived in the area, it was under Taliban influence; Najia said that the Taliban permitted girls to attend school only until class eight.

Attacks Against Teachers and Students

Teachers are sometimes the target of attacks. “Daesh [ISIS] abducted the teachers in our village school, so students got too scared and left school,” said Abdul Hakim, 52, a farmer who fled with his five children to Jalalabad from an area of Nangarhar province controlled by groups affiliated with ISIS. “Daesh told the teachers to give them each alternate months’ salary. The teachers said they’re too poor to do that. Daesh told them, ‘You either give your salary to us or you will stop teaching.’ They freed the teachers after each of them paid ISIS 10,000 Afghanis [US$145].” Abdul Hakim said that the ISIS-affiliated groups did not specifically prohibit girls’ education, “but they announced on their FM radio, ‘What would girls do with education?’”

When teachers are targeted, it often means the de facto closure of a school. Wahid, 29, described why his extended family fled rural Nangarhar to Jalalabad: “Daesh took money from teachers, schools stopped working, and we became IDPs [internally displaced persons].” Wahid said the family had previously been targeted by the Taliban for being affiliated with the government, but they stayed on until ISIS-affiliated groups replaced the Taliban. The ISIS-affiliated groups abducted and beheaded people, and it became impossible for the children to go to school. In Jalalabad, the children have all re-enrolled in school.

Some girls and boys are forced out of school because insurgents regard their families as being aligned with the government. “There are a lot of threats in this area,” a community-based education worker responsible for encouraging families to send their daughters to school in Kandahar told Human Rights Watch. “Especially daughters of police or security officials face a lot of problems. They fear that if they come to [school], they could be lost, kidnapped.”

Insurgent groups also sometimes operate their own schools, which may be targeted by the government. A government official in Balkh province said that the government had shut down a Taliban madrasa, and in retaliation the Taliban had closed two government schools. Insurgents often exert control over schools that continue to function in areas that have fallen under their control or influence, dictating what can be taught and controlling other aspects of the school’s operation.

Acid Attacks

Female students have at times been the target of acid attacks. Bina, a 35-year-old mother of 10 children, explained why her family fled to Jalalabad in 2011. “We left Bati Kot because the Taliban put acid on girls,” she said. “Seven or eight girls were injured on their way to school in the morning.” She said that the girls were teenagers, and that the attacker was on a motorcycle and had his face covered. After the attack, she said the attackers left a letter in the mosque addressed to the families of the injured girls: “They said they should not go to school, because they are too old.” After the attack, Bina said that about two-thirds of the school’s 150 girls had stopped attending.

It can be difficult to determine whether acid attacks are related to the insurgency or not. “Boys stand in front of the school and say this is acid and I will throw it,” said Chehrah, 16. She was in primary school when students at the high school next door were the target of an acid attack by men on motorcycles with their faces covered. She said that five students were hit with the acid. “I think there are two reasons this happens,” Chehrah said. “First these boys don’t like girls going to school. And second, they want a [romantic] connection with these girls, but the girls don’t want that.”

Acid attacks strike great fear among girls and their parents, and lead to large numbers of girls being taken out of school. Maliha, 17, was in class five at a government school in Kandahar when her classmates were the target of an acid attack in 2008. “I was at school that day,” she said. “After a few minutes, a student whose sister was burned came in crying. It happened on the road right in front of the school.” Maliha said that 15 students were injured, four seriously: “Some students lost their eyes—their faces were burned.” Maliha said that after the attack, “[a]ll the family decided no girls in our family will go to school…. But for years I fought them and continued.” Maliha managed to stay in school until she was 16, and in class 11, but then she decided to quit because her father was struggling to support his nine children, and as the oldest child Maliha felt she should help. When Human Rights Watch interviewed her, she was about to start training to become a polio vaccinator.

Military and Insurgent Use of Schools and Recruitment of Child Soldiers

Afghan government and pro-government security forces have increasingly been using schools—the only concrete-reinforced buildings in some villages—as military bases during offensive operations against Taliban-held areas. Even if the buildings remain unscathed, military occupation interrupts children’s education. But all too often, the schools become battlegrounds as the Taliban counterattack government positions, leaving the buildings damaged or in ruins.

Insurgent groups have also used schools. Any presence in schools of fighters from either side of the conflict is likely to drive away students, especially girls, immediately and indefinitely.

In 2016, Human Rights Watch documented the occupation or other use for military purposes of 12 schools in a single area of Baghlan province in northeastern Afghanistan. In 2016, UNAMA found that, “[t]he occupation or use of educational facilities for military purposes occurred throughout Afghanistan, including in Helmand, Kunduz, Logar, Maidan Wardak, Takhar, Farah, Badakshan, Ghor, Jawzjan and Paktya provinces”—10 out of the country’s 34 provinces.

One government official described a situation in Kandahar province where a newly opened school was occupied by the Taliban. Government security forces attacked the Taliban forces deployed in the school, causing major damage to the structure, damage that was compounded when the Taliban blasted the building as they withdrew. “The students are now studying in a tent,” the official said.

In areas that had fallen under ISIS control, one government education official described the damage to government schools: “ISIS looted and took everyth