“FORGOTTEN”
“This campaign is meant to bring the attention of the world again to the girls in Afghanistan, and (their) education issues,” Faruqi told AFP by telephone.
“Afghanistan seems to be forgotten,” she added.
The near-total exclusion of women from Afghan public life, including in education and employment, has become one of the major sticking points preventing the international community from offering aid and official recognition to the Taliban government.
Conditions for women and girls in Afghanistan are the “worst globally”, a UN report found last month, saying that the Taliban government’s policies – which are based on their strict interpretation of Islam – could amount to a “gender apartheid.”
In fact, the state of women’s rights in Afghanistan “should count as a crime against humanity, and it should be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court,” the UN special envoy for global education, former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, told reporters during a video meeting Tuesday.
“TRAGIC”
In 2021, only one month after returning to power for the first time in 20 years, the Taliban authorities banned girls from attending secondary school, before closing university doors to them in December 2022 and then heavily restricting their participation in the workforce.
For Faruqi, these circumstances cannot stand: “We have to make sure that (girls and women) have access to equal opportunities, and they have access to education, because education is the key to freedom,” she told AFP.
“Girls have been banned from public spaces: schools, gyms, parks; there is nothing allowed for them to do; just to stay at home,” she explained in a UN statement Tuesday.
For many families, the only path forward for their daughters is marriage, “regardless of their consent”, she told AFP, adding that many of her own classmates have been forced to marry.
“Depression is widespread. The rate of suicide for girls has gone up a lot in the last two years. It is tragic,” she said in the statement.
The Education Cannot Wait campaign will aim to raise global awareness of the issue via social media into next month, amplifying the voices of Afghan girls and women just as world leaders gather for the UN General Assembly Sep 18 and 19.