Giving Compass' Take:
- Annie Banerji, Emma Batha, and Shadi Khan Saif discuss Afghanistan's educational gender inequity that, with the rule of the Taliban, has only worsened.
- What kind of international organizations is providing educational outreach in countries like these?
- Learn about the cost of not educating women.
What is Giving Compass?
We connect donors to learning resources and ways to support community-led solutions. Learn more about us.
Cooped up at home in Herat, Afghanistan, Zainab Muhammadi reminisces about hanging out with her friends in the cafeteria after coding class. Now she logs on every day to secret online lessons.
Her school shut down after the Taliban took control of the country in August. But that did not stop Muhammadi from learning.
"There are threats and dangers to girls like me. If the Taliban get to know ... they might punish me severely. They might even stone me to death," said Muhammadi, who requested to use a pseudonym to protect her identity.
"But I have not lost hope or my aspirations. I'm determined to continue studying," the 25-year-old told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on a video call.
She is one of an estimated hundreds of Afghan girls and women who are continuing to learn — some online and others in hidden makeshift classrooms — despite the Taliban's closure of their schools.
Fereshteh Forough, the CEO and founder of Code to Inspire (CTI) — Afghanistan's first all-female coding academy — created encrypted virtual classrooms, uploaded course content online, and gave laptops and internet packages to about 100 of her students, including Muhammadi.
Read the full article about Afghan education by Annie Banerji, Emma Batha, and Shadi Khan Saif at Global Citizen.