Afghanistan: Ten facts about the world’s most severe women’s rights crisis
Four years after the Taliban took over Afghanistan in August 2021, dozens of its directives have stripped Afghan women and girls of their rights to education, work, freedom of movement and participation in public life.
With each new restriction, women are being pushed further out of public life – and closer to being erased from it altogether.
UN Women has compiled 10 key facts which explain the most severe women’s rights crisis in the world – affecting 21 million women living in Afghanistan – and how it is being normalized.
A generation of women is being left behind by the education ban.
Girls around the age of 13 are banned from continuing to secondary school, and women are banned from universities. Already, as a result, nearly 80 per cent of young Afghan women between the ages of 18 and 29 are not in education, employment or training.
Afghanistan now has one of the largest workforce gender gaps in the world.
Across Afghanistan, women and men struggle to find sustainable, decent work. Just one in four women is working or seeking work, compared to nearly 90 per cent of men. This is no accident. The Taliban have issued sweeping bans that prohibit women from working in sectors that once offered employment opportunities, such as the civil service, national and international NGOs, and beauty salons.
Afghan women are experiencing a worsening health crisis.
By 2026, the bans on university and secondary education for women and girls are projected to increase child marriage by 25 per cent, increase childbearing among adolescent girls by 45 per cent, and increase maternal mortality by at least 50 per cent. The current context in Afghanistan has triggered an acute mental health crisis among women and girls, who report rising levels of anxiety, hopelessness and despair.
Women’s representation in decision-making has vanished.
Afghanistan’s de facto cabinet is filled by men, as are leadership positions at the sub-national level. Women have been intentionally excluded from all levels of political decision-making.
Women are prevented from accessing public spaces.
This includes parks, gyms and sports clubs.
Women are at greater risk of gender-based violence.
While it is not possible to safely or reliably collect nationwide data on gender-based violence in Afghanistan, anecdotal evidence suggests that an already difficult situation in 2021 has significantly worsened. At the same time, services for survivors have been drastically reduced and formal sources of support, such as the Ministry of Women’s Affairs and legislation to prosecute cases of violence against women, have been dismantled.
Even though the latest war in Afghanistan has ended, most women still don’t feel safe in their communities.
More than 3,300 men designated by the Taliban now enforce a sweeping set of restrictions, such as the requirement that women not speak in public.
These directives are set out in the Law on the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice – the “morality law” – introduced in August 2024. UN surveys found that families and communities are now enforcing restrictions on women’s freedoms, in line with the law.
A string of refugee crises is deepening the women’s rights crisis.
Afghanistan is already facing one of the world’s most severe humanitarian crises, in which the impacts of conflict, poverty and natural disasters are felt more deeply by women and girls. Now, this year alone, more than 1.7 million Afghans have returned – many forcibly – from Iran and Pakistan. Women and girls represent one-third of returnees from Iran this year, and about half from Pakistan. They face increased risks of poverty, early marriage, violence and exploitation.
Many women-led organizations can no longer effectively reach women and girls in their communities due to global aid cuts.
These funding cuts are threatening what remains of Afghan women’s civil society, which has played a critical role in delivering services, documenting abuses and sustaining networks of solidarity. Nearly 40 per cent of the 207 organizations surveyed by the UN in March 2025 reported that all donor-dependent projects were on hold.
Despite these unimaginable restrictions, Afghan women continue to find ways to build community, run businesses, deliver services to women in need, document rights abuses on the ground and deliver humanitarian aid. Through these daily acts of resilience and courage, Afghan women show they have not given up – and demand that we do not either.
