Originally published 2022-03-26.
On the morning of 23 March 2022, thousands of Afghan girls put on their school uniforms for the first time in seven months and walked to class. Within hours they were sent home. The Taliban’s education ministry, which had promised that schools would open to all students on the first day of the Afghan new year, announced that secondary schools for girls above grade six would stay closed until further notice. The official reason was that a suitable uniform had not yet been decided.
That “temporary” closure never ended. This article explains what was announced, the reasons the Taliban gave, how Afghans and the wider world reacted, and what has happened to girls’ education since.
What the ministry announced
After the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, primary schools reopened for both boys and girls, with strict separation, while secondary schools reopened for boys only. In a handful of provinces, mostly in the north, older girls went back anyway. Nationally, the ministry said everyone, girls included, would return when the new school year began in March.
The reversal came on the very day schools reopened. According to the BBC, the ministry’s notice read: “We inform all girls’ high schools and those schools that [have] female students above class six that they are off until the next order.” Ministry spokesman Mawlawi Aziz Ahmad Ryan told reporters that a plan would be drawn up in line with Islamic law and Afghan custom.
The scope is worth stating precisely. The order did not close primary schools for girls. It affected girls from roughly age 12 upward, the secondary years that lead to university entrance and to most professional careers.
The reasons given, and why few believed them
Taliban officials offered several explanations, and they did not always match. The most prominent was clothing. Suhail Shaheen, the Taliban’s nominee as UN ambassador, described it to NPR as a technical question of choosing a school uniform for girls. Others mentioned a shortage of female teachers, a lack of money and the need to revise the curriculum.
A report for the US Congress noted these shifting and sometimes conflicting reasons and said the true motive was unclear. One analysis it cited attributed the decision to hardline clerics who persuaded the supreme leader, Haibatullah Akhundzada, to overrule the ministry. That reading is supported by visible splits: Ahmad Yasir, a deputy in the office of the first deputy prime minister, tweeted that Islam offers no justification for keeping girls out of school, then deleted the post.
The uniform explanation was hard to take at face value for a simple reason. Girls had arrived that morning in the modest uniforms and head coverings schools already required, and several reportedly offered to wear burqas if they could stay.
Scenes at the school gates
Teachers in Kabul described principals telling students to leave and wait for permission. Many girls cried in classrooms and at the gates; others were angry. One student asked a reporter, as quoted by NPR: “What is our crime? That we are girls?”
Afghan broadcaster TOLOnews filmed a girl in Kabul pleading with the authorities to reopen all girls’ schools across the country. Her clip spread widely the same day.
A girl in Kabul cried while talking about being prevented from entering the classroom. She urged the Islamic Emirate to reopen all girls’ schools across the country.#TOLOnews pic.twitter.com/MPcmOLxjUw
— TOLOnews (@TOLOnews) March 23, 2022
Parents were no less upset. Many families had kept their daughters studying at home through the winter on the strength of the ministry’s promise, and the last-minute change felt to them like a betrayal rather than a delay.
How the world responded
The reaction was swift. UN Secretary-General António Guterres said he deeply regretted the decision and urged the Taliban to open schools to all students without delay. Malala Yousafzai, shot by the Pakistani Taliban in 2012 for campaigning for girls’ education, said the Taliban had not kept their promise and would keep finding excuses. Heather Barr of Human Rights Watch warned the ban could become indefinite, as it had been in the 1990s.
The US State Department called it a deeply disappointing and inexplicable reversal and cancelled planned meetings with Taliban officials on economic issues. The World Bank reportedly suspended several hundred million dollars of planned projects in Afghanistan. Western donors had made girls’ education a condition for restoring aid and for any path to formal recognition, which is why many observers had expected the schools to open.
Why it echoed the 1990s
During their first period in power, from 1996 to 2001, the Taliban barred girls from school almost entirely. During the twenty years of insurgency that followed, they tolerated some girls’ schooling where local communities insisted on it, but also carried out numerous attacks on girls’ schools.
Between 2001 and 2021, millions of Afghan girls enrolled in school and women entered universities, medicine, law, journalism and politics in numbers the country had never seen. That is what made March 2022 so significant: it was the clearest early signal that the movement’s second government would not be very different from its first on the question of women.
What happened next
The secondary schools did not reopen for girls. On 20 December 2022, the Taliban’s higher education minister, Neda Mohammad Nadeem, ordered all public and private universities to suspend education for women until further notice. By then women had also been pushed out of many government jobs, required to have a male relative for longer journeys and banned from parks, gyms and public baths.
In August 2024, UNESCO estimated that at least 1.4 million girls had been deliberately denied secondary education since the takeover. Counting girls already out of school before the bans, the agency put the total at almost 2.5 million, about 80 percent of Afghan girls of school age. Primary enrolment also fell, from 6.8 million pupils in 2019 to 5.7 million in 2022, which UNESCO linked partly to a ban on women teaching boys and partly to economic hardship. Afghanistan is the only country in the world that bars girls and women from secondary and higher education.
Some Afghan families now rely on secret home classes, online courses or religious schools, which remain open but do not replace a full curriculum. These efforts carry risks for teachers and students alike.
Myths and misunderstandings
- “All girls are banned from school”: the 2022 order applied to grades seven and above. Primary schooling for girls continued, under separation rules.
- “It was only about uniforms”: officials gave several reasons, and the ban outlasted every one of them.
- “Islam forbids girls’ education”: Muslim-majority countries educate girls at every level, and even some Taliban officials publicly said there is no religious basis for the ban.
- “It was temporary”: more than four years on, secondary schools for girls remain closed.
Sources: NPR, 23 March 2022; Congressional Research Service: Education for Afghan Girls Under the Taliban; The Peninsula/AP, 20 December 2022; PBS NewsHour/AP on UNESCO figures, August 2024; original reporting by BBC News.
COMMENTS