VIII. Girls’ Secondary School Education

I studied through the sixth grade here in my village. Afterwards I screamed and kicked to have my parents let me go to school but it didn’t work, they said there is no [secondary] school here to send me.... I am sad when I see my brothers go to school.

—Samira D., 13-year-old girl not attending school, Koh-i-Band district, Kapisa, April 24, 2008

People here will send their girls to school if we had schools for them. We recently had a male parliamentarian from our area push to have this addition [for] the boys’ school built. But they just don’t care about building one for the girls.

—Abdul K., Farza district, May 2, 2008

Improving access to education for girls has been a cornerstone of the reconstruction and development process in Afghanistan following the fall of the Taliban in 2002. There has been significant progress: in 2002, fewer than one million children were enrolled in formal education,[241] and by the 2008-2009 school year, this number had surpassed six million, more than at any other point in Afghanistan’s history.[242] However, the greatest gains have largely been confined to primary school, with dramatic a drop in participation, especially pronounced for girls, in secondary school.

Despite their commitments, the Afghan government and international donors have failed to ensure the right to education is progressively realized on a basis of equality between boys and girls. While boys’ primary school enrollment targets set out in the Afghanistan Compact and the Afghan National Development Strategy are close to being met, girls’ primary enrollment rates remain far short of the original goal. This gender difference exists despite the fact that the target for girls, 60 percent net enrollment, was already modified downward from the boys’ target of 75 percent.[243]

At the secondary level, the number of enrolled girls drops by half from 200,523 in grade six to 97,310 in grade seven.[244] Eleven percent of Afghanistan’s secondary school-age girls are enrolled in lower secondary school (grades 7-9) and only 4 percent in higher secondary school (grades 10-12). Although the net enrollment rate of boys drops as well, girls’ participation drops off more sharply: from comprising 37 percent of students in primary school, female students are only 27 percent of students in lower secondary school.[245] Despite this pattern, there is little systematic monitoring by the Ministry of Education and district-level officials on the rates of and reasons for girls’ discontinuation of school or gender-specific retention strategies.

The Importance of Girls’ Education

Education has profound implications for the intellectual and social development of girls and young women and their ability to exercise and enjoy a range of human rights. Secondary education is key to overcoming entrenched and historical discrimination. Adolescence is a critical period in which the pressure to adhere to traditional gender roles becomes much stronger, a tendency made more pronounced by early marriage, segregation, responsibility for household work, and childbearing.

Extensive research demonstrates that girls’ education, and particularly secondary schooling, is linked to patterns of delaying marriage and childbearing and greater use of reliable family planning methods. Both child and maternal survival rates increase as education rates increase. These benefits are of crucial importance in Afghanistan, where health indicators are among the lowest in the world. In addition to the effect on health practices, girls’ education facilitates and strengthens their participation in the workforce as skilled personnel who can contribute to Afghanistan’s economy and governance. Educated young women can also begin to fill urgent needs for more female teachers and female health workers across the country. As a female government official in Kabul said:

We can’t hire women in civil service cadres if they don’t receive higher education. They couldn’t even get there without secondary education. Until girls are educated, we can’t help women advance.[246]

Major Barriers to Girls’ Education

There are a range of factors that impede girls’ access to secondary education, from security threats and cultural barriers to the much higher numbers of boys’ schools. Early marriage, shortages of qualified female teachers especially in rural areas, and poor school infrastructure are also barriers to girls’ secondary education.

In the southern and southeastern parts of Afghanistan, continuing armed conflict and targeted attacks against schools, teachers, and students have arrested progress in education. According to data from the Ministry of Education, in the first five months of the Afghan year 1388 (April to August 2009),102 schools were attacked using explosives or arson. One hundred and five school students and teachers were killed by insurgent attacks (though it is not clear that these were necessarily targeted killings). Although these attacks were against both male and female teachers and students, several poison attacks in 2009 were clearly directed at girls, with 200 students poisoned this year, of whom 196 were female.[247]

But girls’ secondary schooling has faltered even in parts of the country that have been relatively free from armed conflict and that should have, in the last seven years, been able to focus more fully on rehabilitation and development initiatives. This section addresses girls’ and young women’s access to secondary education in central Afghanistan, where armed conflict is not the primary obstacle and where, despite the significant expansion of education initiatives in recent years, deep disparities exist between girls’ and boys’ school enrollment rates.

Contrary to common assumptions that many Afghan parents do not support girls’ education, national surveys and Human Rights Watch research in the country since 2002 indicate that a majority of families want their daughters to attend school. However, parents are often willing to educate their daughters only if it meets certain conditions that satisfy cultural sensitivities and practical concerns, for example, having sex-segregated classrooms and female or trusted male teachers, being located a reasonable and safe distance from their home, being affordable, and offering a minimum quality of education.

No Nearby Girls’ schools: Further to Walk than Boys

Insecurity and long distances to schools, and often the relationship between the two, are leading factors affecting girls’ ability to attend secondary school. The distribution of secondary schools is concentrated in provincial capitals, and there are large areas without a school. Where schools do exist, they often involve long journeys. In six of the eight districts in central Afghanistan where Human Rights Watch conducted research, girls who wanted to go to secondary school had to walk at least one hour and as much as six hours a day to attend the nearest school. As Abdul K., said:

People here will send their girls to school if we had schools for them. We recently had a male parliamentarian from our area push to have this addition [for] the boys’ school built. But they just don’t care about building one for the girls.[248]

Overall UNIFEM estimated in 2008 that only 19 percent of schools are designated as girls’ schools.[249] According to an education ministry official, of 11,000 schools in the country, approximately half are co-ed, most of which are at the primary level. Of the remaining schools, boys’ schools outnumber girls’ schools nearly three to one (4,095 to 1,622). The proportion is similarly skewed at the secondary level, where there are 1,846 co-ed schools, 1,583 boys’ schools, and only 609 girls’ schools.

In 2008, Human Rights Watch spoke with 25 girls and young women in central Afghanistan who were not attending school because there was no school within reasonable traveling distance. Twenty-year-old Nilab B., in Kapisa province, said that she had family support to attend school and had studied until the seventh grade. She discontinued her schooling, citing distance as the major barrier. She said, “The boys’ school is about 1.5 to 2 kilometers from here, it is not very far. I would go to school if the girls’ secondary school was closer.”[250]

In Mirza Mir in Kapisa province, the nearest boys’ school, which serves first through twelfth grades, is a 20-30 minute walk on a paved road. Wafa H., age 14, who had to stop school after the sixth grade said, “We want the same for us girls.”[251] The closest girls’ school is an hour-and-a-half hike up a steep mountainside and has classes for girls only from first through eighth grade. Maihan M., age 18, also said she had no way to continue her education because of this.[252] Also in Kapisa province Fariba K., the mother of two daughters, told us, “We have asked the district for a secondary school, but nothing [has happened] yet. I would let my daughters go if the school were closer—like the boys’ school.”[253]

Roya H., age 18 and in twelfth grade in a Bamiyan district school, told us, “When I first started walking to school, it would take me almost three hours each way. It was so far that my feet would blister and swell up. I could barely put my shoes back on in the morning.... The other girls who used to walk with me dropped out years ago because the school is too far.”[254] Nazanin F., age 15, and Parwana L., age 14, leave home in Atta Khan Sofla village in Kapisa province at 7 a.m. and walk for an hour-and-a-half to reach the school where they attend the eighth and seventh grades respectively. Nazanin said of their long walk, “Some areas are all rock and very steep. I stop along the road and sit on the rocks when I get tired. When I get to the top of the mountain I can see the whole valley—that is how high I walk up.... I am not sure how much longer my parents will let me go to school.”[255]

Fears of Kidnapping, Harassment, and Social Stigma

The issue of long distances is compounded by general insecurity or perceptions of insecurity. Most girls we spoke to who were not in school said one of the reasons they did not go or their families did not allow them to attend was fear of their being kidnapped along the way. Almost all of the schoolgirls we talked to refused to walk to school alone for fear of being harassed.Rahim A., a teacher in Shebar district, Bamiyan, said:

At the sixth and seventh grades I start to see girls starting to miss class more and more. There are many reasons for this, but mainly the distances that were okay for them to walk as younger girls become more difficult for them from a security standpoint as older girls. Families fear that they will be kidnapped or harassed. There is a pretty typical pattern. Girls get older, their families fear that they will run off or be kidnapped at school or on the way to school.[256]

While families are concerned about every child’s security, in some cases parents have different standards for distances they find safe and culturally acceptable to send their daughters for education in comparison to their sons. Shaima N., age 13, noted that her parents allowed her brother to attend a co-ed school a few miles from their village in Parwan province, but that they felt it was too far away for girls.[257]

Sexual harassment of schoolgirls in Afghanistan is an extremely sensitive issue that many families feel affects a girls’ reputation and her eligibility for marriage. Communities sometimes blame girls for provoking harassment, and in many cases the situation is seen as one of public shame or dishonor for the family. In such situations, families can feel so embarrassed and anxious that they withdraw the girl from school. Consequently, even absent a specific incident, parents worry about the social stigma that may attach to girls walking to school. Latifa R., a 14-year-old girl in Kapisa province said, “My family wants me to finish twelfth grade.... There are girls in our village who do not go to school...they used to go but then stopped, because their fathers, brothers, or other relatives don’t want them to walk all the way where they can be seen.”[258]

Ahmad K., a grandfather from Mirza Mir village in Kapisa, said he never had the opportunity to go to school but knows how valuable education is today. However, although he allowed his granddaughters to attend primary school located in their village, he will not allow them to go to secondary school:

The closest girls’ high school is three hours away and the route is winding and has some very shaded and secluded areas. This route is very dangerous for my granddaughters. Local strongmen and commanders will kidnap young girls they see and like. They see the routes to school as the perfect opportunity to take our girls. Because of this we won’t let them travel very far... If the school was closer to us, I could walk them to school and back, but I won’t allow them to travel three hours each way without an adult with them.[259]

Shortcomings in Government and Donors’ Approaches to Girls’ Education

The Afghan government and international donors have made tremendous strides in school enrollment and beginning the long process of rehabilitating educational infrastructure, but the primary emphasis has been on primary school and higher education. There is a surprising gap for secondary school, the time when girls are most likely to leave school and when gender-competent strategies are especially critical given heightened pressure to marry and heightened fears of sexual harassment. As an education provider in Kabul said:

Stakeholders are caught up in primary education....We are doing a disservice to the kids in this country by taking them halfway there and then leaving them behind.[260]

The Ministry of Education has missed key opportunities to make formal education more accessible to adolescent girls, including creating larger numbers of small, community-based schools instead of large schools in cities; emphasizing retention programs for girls; and implementing action plans for safe routes to schools.

Furthermore, the education sector, similar to many other branches of the Afghan government, struggles with an onerous government procurement process and weak coordination between the Ministry of Education, the United Nations, donors, and NGOs.[261] The Afghan government has direct control over 62 percent of education funds, and the rest is delivered through external channels, primarily private contractors and NGOs.[262] Many donors interested in Afghanistan want to fund education projects for women and girls. However, without the Afghan government directing this funding into planned programs, such as ensuring girls’ integration into the formal education system at the secondary level, much of this funding has been devoted to community-based schools at the primary level and non-formal literacy programs. While such initiatives are an important strategy especially in areas of conflict or areas with strong cultural sensitivities, in other places they divert girls into informal programs with little opportunity to transition into higher levels of formal education and obtain the accompanying credentials.

For example, USAID funded a large education project entitled the Afghanistan Primary Education Program (APEP) (2003-2007), which set up elementary education classes in homes, mosques, schools, and other community venues with the intention of quickly raising the educational levels of older students who had not attended school and moving them into Afghanistan’s public school system at the appropriate grade level. Many education ministry officials considered the US$89 million project a successful program.[263] Some 170,000 students were enrolled in the program, which ended in 2006, of whom some 150,000 completed the program.[264]

This program clearly met a pressing need after the ouster of the Taliban, when a generation of children had been denied the right to school. However, upon completion of the accelerated course, students in many cases were offered no transition to formal schooling. Monitoring and evaluation of the program addressed issues such as competency levels of students, but not how many students were able to meet the initial goal of continuing on to secondary school.[265]

The Ministry of Education issued guidelines in March 2008 under the National Education Strategic Plan which ordered the gradual integration of community-based schools, teachers, and students into the government system. The government has already begun the process of assessing and improving the professional qualifications of teachers in community-based schools, and taking over responsibility for paying their salaries. The government also says that it will increase the recognition of qualifications of students in community-based schools so that they can progress to secondary and further education.[266] Other NGOs have begun handing schools over to the control of the government, or building schools that the government then staffs with teachers. Despite this step toward synchronization, greater efforts are required to ensure that male and female students have equal access to all levels of education and formal credentials, without losing any of the potential security benefits that community-based schools may have afforded.

The Right to Education Under National and International Law

Afghanistan’s constitution, adopted in 2004, includes a right to education, stating that the state must “devise and implement effective programs for a balanced expansion of education all over Afghanistan, provide compulsory intermediate level education,” and “adopt necessary measures for promotion of education in all levels.”[267] The state must also “devise and implement effective programs for balancing and promoting education for women.”[268] Afghanistan’s Education Law, adopted in 2008, makes basic education (comprising grades 1-9) compulsory and provides that education be provided without discrimination.[269]

Education is a fundamental human right enshrined in numerous international human rights instruments, which Afghanistan has ratified.[270] The ICESCR and the Convention on the Rights of the Child each specifies that primary education must be "compulsory and available free to all." Secondary education, including vocational education, must be "available and accessible to every child," with the progressive introduction of free secondary education.[271]The Convention on the Rights of the Child also specifies that states must “take measures to encourage regular attendance and the reduction of [school] drop-out rates.”[272]

Fundamental to the right to education is the state's obligation to provide it in a non-discriminatory manner.[273] For example, Afghanistan’s obligations under CEDAW require it to take all appropriate measures to eliminate discrimination against women in order to ensure equal rights in education.[274]

The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the expert body responsible for monitoring compliance with the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, has stated, “The prohibition against discrimination enshrined in article 2(2) of the Covenant is subject to neither progressive realization nor the availability of resources; it applies fully and immediately to all aspects of education and encompasses all internationally prohibited grounds of discrimination.”[275]