The first female graduates in the history of Old Aqcha pose with the school’s founder, Mohamed Ishaq, back row, third from right, and the school’s current principal, Mohamed Ibrahim, back row, fourth from right. Mujib Mashal

OLD AQCHA, Afghanistan — Twelve years ago, Mohamed Ishaq — “Ishaq, the teacher,” as he is known — gave two rooms in his house to start a girls’ school in this small village in northern Jawzjan province. He moved his family to the remaining two rooms.

By 2008, the number of students had grown to more than 150, and the girls’ school was relocated to the campus of the local boys’ high school. Now the school operates in two shifts: The boys are taught in the morning, and the 620 female students are taught in the afternoon by eight teachers, six of them male and two female.

On a cold morning this December, the female school graduated its first class of 16 girls; for the first time in its history, the village had female high school graduates. But the historic occasion was overshadowed by the boy’s graduation that day.

As the joint ceremony got under way in a makeshift tent, local government officials gave lengthy speeches despite the unbearable cold: One quoted Winston Churchill, another Socrates, and a third talked about Iran’s sending a monkey to space. Students read poetry and essays prepared for the occasion. The turbaned Ishaq, tightly wrapped in his shawl, quietly looked on from a distance. He twice pulled out his phone to call female graduates who were absent from the ceremony but managed to persuade only 13 to attend. The remaining three girls missed the occasion because their families objected to their attendance at the co-ed ceremony.

After young boys, who wore the traditional warm chapans on top of their sky blue uniforms, sang an Uzbek song about education, the male graduates in suits and ties lined up in front of the audience. One by one, they were handed their certificates as a crowd of young men in the aisle snapped photographs. Family members made their way through the crowd to present the graduates with flowers. At the conclusion of the boys’ ceremony, 13 girls were presented with their certificates in haste. There were no flowers or photos until they moved to a corner of the tent and formed a private clique. The girls quickly took their certificates and went back to their seats.

The Afghan government and its international allies have touted female school enrollment as one of the biggest achievements of their efforts to strengthen women’s rights after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. But beneath the rising enrollment numbers — the Afghan government says there are roughly 4 million girls in school — lies a more complicated reality. While 66 percent of girls attend primary school, compared with 92 percent of boys, the share of girls attending secondary school drops to 26 percent. Across the country, the growth in enrollment rates has been uneven. Over the past decade, nearly 350,000 girls have completed high school. In Kandahar, the country’s fifth-most-populous province, there are only 4,027 female high school graduates. Continuous fighting with the insurgency and a deeply rooted conservatism have hampered progress there.