Afghanistan is the only country on earth that bans girls from school past primary level

Five years after the Taliban returned to power, the UN published an assessment of what has happened to Afghan women. The phrase it used was that they have been erased from public life.

Here are the figures behind that phrase.

What the numbers say

2.4m

girls excluded from secondary education, per UNESCO

100+

decrees issued restricting education, work and movement for women

1 in 2

women interviewed who leave home only once or twice a month

UNESCO describes Afghanistan as the only country in the world that formally prohibits education for girls and women beyond primary level. Other countries have lower enrolment. Afghanistan is the only one where the ban is policy.

The restrictions are cumulative, and they are recent

The restrictions did not all arrive in 2021. OHCHR's report of 30 March 2026, covering August 2025 to January 2026, lists measures that are months old:

• Women barred from UN premises since September 2025
• Female civil servants — who had been receiving a reduced salary — terminated in January 2026
• Women banned from medical institutes since December 2024, with medical graduation exams held without female candidates
• Women's books removed from libraries and bookstores; teaching of human rights and gender studies prohibited

Volker Türk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, presented the report, which says the human rights situation continues to deteriorate dramatically.

The second-order arithmetic

The consequences do not stop at the classroom door.

UNICEF has warned that restrictions on girls' education and women's employment could cost Afghanistan more than 25,000 female teachers and health workers by 2030.

Many Afghan women cannot be treated by a male doctor, so fewer female health workers means fewer women treated at all. The UN's assessment already records higher rates of maternal death, child marriage and gender-based violence.

The aid cuts land here too

Afghanistan sits in the lower group of the UN's 2026 prioritisation — one of the responses with less than half of its assessed needs inside the priority tier.

OHCHR's report records roughly 21.9 million people — about 45 per cent of the population — in need of humanitarian assistance, and nearly three million Afghans returned from neighbouring countries during 2025, a return movement arriving into an economy that cannot absorb it.

And within that shrinking response, one category of organisation was hit hardest. Nearly three-quarters of the women-led organisations surveyed for the UN's assessment reported funding cuts in 2025.

Those organisations are often the only ones able to reach Afghan women, since male aid workers frequently cannot.