Taliban authorities have squeezed girls out of schooling, jobs and public life since 2021, creating what the United Nations has referred to as “gender apartheid” [GETTY]
Restrictions on girls and women imposed for the reason that Taliban authorities took energy are projected to price Afghanistan virtually six p.c of its GDP over two years, the UN improvement company nation director stated on Thursday.
Taliban authorities have squeezed girls out of schooling, jobs and public life since 2021, creating what the United Nations has referred to as “gender apartheid”.
The social and financial exclusion of girls and women is anticipated to quantity to cumulative losses of $920 million, 5.8 p.c of GDP, between 2024 and 2026, in response to a brand new UN Growth Programme (UNDP) report.
“It is a main hit to the financial system,” Stephen Rodriques, UNDP consultant in Afghanistan, informed AFP.
Solely seven p.c of girls in Afghan households are employed, whereas girls’s participation within the workforce was round 15 p.c earlier than the Taliban takeover, Rodriques stated.
Eradicating restrictions on girls’s entry to jobs and on their freedom to journey with no male guardian “may see a dramatic improve in girls’s employment”, he stated, in addition to possible encouraging donors to “launch extra funding” to the nation.
The problem is a part of an general “very regarding” trajectory for Afghanistan, he added.
The report warned that Afghanistan, dealing with the world’s second-worst humanitarian crisis after war-torn Sudan, is “sinking deeper into socioeconomic disaster”.
Modest financial progress in 2023-2024 hinged on humanitarian and improvement help flowing into the financial system, similar to by cash-for-work initiatives that gave households spending energy.
However aid to Afghanistan has decreased steadily lately, with restrictions on girls’s rights a serious sticking level for donors.
And funding has plummeted additional with US President Donald Trump’s decision to slash international help.
“Extra individuals are at a subsistence degree in 2024 than they have been in 2023, and that is earlier than these new cuts,” Rodriques stated.
“Issues are reversing.”
