Razia rarely leaves her home, but she has big dreams.
An Afghan woman in her early 20s, Razia lives with her six adult siblings in her brother’s house outside Kabul. Their parents are dead, so they all pitch in to keep the family going. Razia is a skilled seamstress; she embroiders beautiful dresses for weddings and other occasions. It brings in a little money.
Since the ruling Taliban “temporarily” banned education beyond sixth grade for women in Afghanistan in 2022, Razia has been unable to attend public high school or university. She can’t even leave the house without a male relative and isn’t allowed to speak in public.
“We must wear long dress and cover our faces,” she explained. “We are limited in everything that we want, and we must obey the things we don’t want. It’s so hard.”
Still, Razia clings to educational and professional goals. She wants to study computer science. She dreams of attending university abroad, although she has little chance at the moment of getting a travel visa or paying the tuition. She’d jump at the opportunity to start an online business, perhaps dress design, to help her family.
Sometimes the sheer isolation closes in on her. But Razia has one oasis: Spotty internet and electricity permitting, she joins other young Afghan women online four nights a week to study English via her computer with a volunteer teacher thousands of miles away. It’s not only an opportunity to learn; it’s a precious chance to talk, laugh and socialize with other women facing the same circumstances.
And to know she has not been forgotten by the outside world.
Educational therapist Susan Micari meets online with young women in Afghanistan four times a week to teach English. For some of them, it’s their only connection to the outside world.
“She’s sweet, buoyant and strong,” says Razia’s American teacher, Susan Micari. “She has an open heart. Somehow she’s not been contaminated by fear. She’s a good kid.”
Micari is a licensed educational therapist living in Richmond, Va. She volunteers in the Shokufa Network, a group of 18 female professionals, educators and psychologists who teach 60 Afghan students ranging in age from 12 to late 20s. She began teaching Afghan girls and women online after the United States abruptly pulled out of Afghanistan in August 2021, leaving the civilian population at the mercy of the Taliban.
The sudden U.S. abandonment of Afghanistan after 20 years of post-9/11 war and occupation enabled Taliban insurgents to topple the nation’s weak, corrupt government and resume their oppressive control of Afghan society. The Taliban’s 2022 ban on female secondary and higher education — among other measures taken by the extremist Islamic faction relegating Afghan women to virtual house arrest — has drawn widespread international condemnation, but few other consequences so far.
‘Shokufa’
Shokufa is a Persian word, a feminine given name meaning “blossom” or “flower” — specifically the blossoms that appear on seemingly barren trees in the spring. Could education, development and respect for the basic rights of women return to Afghanistan anytime soon?
“Every day seems to bring a new law limiting women,” laments Meg Chapman, a New York-based architect who helped launch the Shokufa Network. She manages the network’s educational programs while teaching intermediate English to her Afghan students. In addition to basic secondary classes, Shokufa focuses on helping students increase their digital skills, express their creativity and prepare for higher education.
What compels Chapman to help Afghan women she may never meet face to face?
“They are the most mistreated women in the world.”
“They are the most mistreated women in the world,” she says. “So I have to keep doing this. I have to hope that someday this will not be where Afghanistan is. I have absolutely no grounds for that hope, but I refuse to stop hoping for their sake. Educated women are the surest path to stability and prosperity for a country.”
One of her online students is a lawyer in her 30s who fought against violence toward women before she was forced into isolation at home when the Taliban returned to power.
“Every once in a while, she explodes in frustration,” Chapman said. “She wanted to be a judge, and it doesn’t look likely that will ever happen for her. But I have to have hope for her.”
Another of her female students, when asked to give an example of a present participle in English class, offered this: “I am birthing a baby next week.”
She was accurate both grammatically and physically, Chapman recalled. “She missed one class and a week later was back, having given birth to her fourth child. They are the most motivated to learn of any group I’ve ever seen.”
Members of the feminist activist group Femen wear burqas as they protest in solidarity with Afghan women with signs reading “The Taliban Wants to Make Afghan Women Invisible” in Farsi and English on September 25, 2021, in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Adam Berry/Getty Images)
If Afghan women themselves refuse to stop hoping and working for better days, how can those who serve them do any less? Hope is a motivator. So is anger.
“Most of us feel angry,” Micari said of herself and other American women who work with Afghans. “We know what it’s like to be discriminated against here, to be sexually harassed or kept from promotion or not allowed to have opportunities. Those of us who are older remember the days when a woman couldn’t open a business checking account without her husband’s signature. And we all remember what it was like before the days of reproductive freedom. We understand what it’s like to be stepped on — not to the degree of Afghan women, but to a great degree.
“These Afghan women are told there’s only one role for them, which is wife and mother, to be quiet and subservient and self-sacrificing Taliban women. And we find it appalling.”
Staggering barriers
The barriers to any significant change in Afghanistan, however, are staggering:
- Nearly 2.5 million Afghan girls and young women have been barred from secondary education.
- More than 220,000 teachers lost their jobs when the Taliban returned to power.
- The overall adult literacy rate stands at 37%, according to UNESCO, one of the lowest rates in the world. The vast majority of Afghan women are functionally illiterate.
- More than 90% of Afghans live in poverty, according to the International Rescue Committee. The suffering is deepening due to the Taliban’s ongoing economic mismanagement, unintended consequences of international sanctions on the regime — and the forced return of an estimated 1.7 million Afghan refugees from other countries last year (1.3 million from Iran alone).
Amid these harsh realities, most Afghan women and girls languish in the darkness of isolation and lack of education. They have three options for study beyond sixth grade: Home schooling, “secret schools” meeting in some communities, or madrassas, Islamic religious schools that occasionally offer a few (usually substandard) classes on subjects other than religion.
Thousands of secret schools “operate across the country under the Taliban’s radar,” reported Elian Peliter in an in-depth story published Aug. 28 in The New York Times. However, “girls are risking arrest by going to school in secret. Others fail sixth grade on purpose, to remain in their classroom for as long as possible. Principals, teachers and parents operate the schools through a clandestine effort, fighting for what they fear may be a lost cause: to save a generation of girls from ignorance. The Taliban’s leaders do not appear willing to rescind the ban, even while some local officials tolerate the secret schools, worried about denying their own daughters an education.”
FATEN microfinance Ramallah branch. (Stock photo via Getty)
Peltier added: “Even girls who finish their education have few prospects; the Taliban have banned women from most jobs, and opportunities to go abroad are scarce. Reports of suicidal thoughts, self-harm and rates of underage marriage are on the rise, according to teachers and humanitarian organizations.”
A practical alternative
Is there a practical, realistic alternative for educating Afghan girls and women?
Yes, say those who offer “borderless” online secondary and university classes. Shokufa is just one small player in this growing movement. Some organizations count Afghan students in the thousands, with many thousands more on waiting lists.
“We’re part of an umbrella group of about 160 organizations dedicated to educating Afghan women,” said Shokufa’s Chapman. “Together, we’re teaching about 250,000 girls. But that’s a drop in the bucket.”
Maybe, but 250,000 is a pretty big drop: It’s 10% of the 2.5 million Afghan females being shut out of public secondary education.
Representatives from Shokufa and other educational aid groups met Aug. 27 in Washington, D.C., for a policy dialogue titled “Afghanistan’s Future: Building the Foundation for Peace, Prosperity and Stability through Education.” Sponsored by the Afghanistan Policy Lab at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs and the Central Asia Institute, the conference brought together NGOs, activists, academics and diplomats concerned about Afghanistan.
They heard from a variety of policy experts, including Mirwais Balkhi, former minister of education in Afghanistan (2018-2020), now affiliated with the Afghanistan Policy Lab at Princeton and James Madison University. Balkhi and others at the dialogue proposed a “parallel education system” for Afghanistan, consisting of online schools and distance learning for every community with reliable electricity and in-person schools wherever possible.
“No education modality can (replace) in-person education … that is, a school,” Balkhi acknowledged. “However, we are not operating under normal circumstances. The current situation in Afghanistan regarding education, particularly for girls, is dire and complex.”
Despite the growing social and economic damage inflicted by the female education ban, he said, the Taliban is “increasingly unlikely (to) fully reopen secondary and higher education for girls in any meaningful and sustained way. … It is a threat to their sociopolitical vision.”
But a global educational consortium involving governments, NGOs, universities and international organizations “could ensure that all the children of Afghanistan, especially girls, can receive a quality education, paving the way for a brighter and more prosperous future for the nation,” he said. “In the absence of state support, civil society and global actors must invest in these imperfect but indispensable pathways to ensure education does not vanish from the lives of an entire generation.”
Quiet work continues
Meanwhile, the quiet work of educating young Afghan women continues in secret classrooms, homes and online classes. Seth Holm, director of the Afghan Education Student Outreach Project, believes such gatherings are communities of love, value and belonging for women and girls rejected by their own society — and much of the world.
The Taliban claim to offer protection, paternalism and patriarchy for women, Holm said. Real teachers offer love and learning. That can change a culture – if not in this generation of Afghan women, then the next one.
“My hope is for their children,” said Shokufa’s Micari. “If these women can teach their children, that will help them find opportunity and freedom — maybe even in unlikely places.”
Like a flower blossoming on a barren tree.