UN announces support for clandestine girls’ schools in Afghanistan after Taliban ban

The UN will support clandestine schools for girls in Afghanistan and will also fund and sponsor online education for all girls forced to leave the education system after primary school.

United Nations envoy for global education, Britain’s Gordon Brown, held a virtual press conference on Tuesday to mark the second anniversary of the Taliban takeover, focusing on efforts to challenge the Taliban regime’s order to deport girls from close, turn around. of high school and university.

“We are going to fund and sponsor online learning (and) we are going to support clandestine schools, as well as the education of girls who have been forced to leave Afghanistan,” said Brown, who declined to give details about those secret schools “for fear of closing them down.” ”, but specified that “several organizations support these clandestine schools”.

In addition, he announced that he has taken the issue of girls’ exclusion from schools to the International Criminal Court and explained his arguments to prosecutor Karim Khan: banning women’s education amounts to “a gender apartheid” and can be considered as “a crime against humanity”.

According to Brown – who has not yet received Khan’s reply – this ban violates at least three UN international conventions: those of children’s rights, women’s rights and economic and social rights, since education is “a fundamental right”.

Brown said the international community “can and should do more” to force the Taliban to reverse that decision, suggesting, for example, that the US and UK follow the EU’s example in applying concrete sanctions against Afghanistan, or that Muslim countries would send a delegation to Afghanistan. Kandahar – stronghold of the Taliban regime – to explain how Islam in no way supports depriving girls of education.

He said he knows that there are “cracks in the regime” in Afghani due to increasingly stricter measures against women – the most recent being their exclusion from public places, including cemeteries – and that the world should exploit them to achieve the hard core of humanity. the established regime in Kandahar. EFE

Afghans ask for support to study in their country

Somaya Faruqi, leader of the local women’s robot team, who had to emigrate to fulfill her childhood dream of studying engineering, is the face of the UN’s Education Cannot Wait (ECW) campaign for education in emergencies and crises . , under the motto #AfghanGirlsVoices, aims to bring the cry for help of young Afghan girls all over the planet.

Since taking power in Afghanistan two years ago, the Taliban have denied more than 1.1 million young Afghan women access to secondary and university education.

Like many compatriots when the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan on August 15, 2021, Faruqi left the country along with the nine colleagues of that robotics team known as “The Afghan Dreamers”. With a grant from the Qatari Development Fund, he is now studying mechanical engineering in the United States.

She hopes that the #AfghanGirlsVoices campaign, featuring poignant testimonials from girls and young women whose lives have been abruptly turned upside down by the ban on education and training, will “bring young Afghan girls back to the world’s attention”, because in only two years “Afghanistan seems to be forgotten,” he told AFP by phone from California.

“We need to make sure they have access to the same opportunities (as men) and to education, because education is the key to freedom,” he says.

On September 18, 2021, a month after returning to power from which they had been ousted two decades earlier, the Taliban barred girls from accessing secondary education.

In December 2022, the doors of the universities were also closed to them, in addition to the ban on women working in many sectors, despite the fact that many are the sole breadwinners of families in which many men died in the war.