Taliban continue their restrictions on women, now banning them from working for local and international NGOs
By Mahsa Elham
In a written order issued on December 24, the Taliban banned women and girls from working for local and foreign non-governmental organizations (NGOs). It’s the latest in a series of increasingly draconian restrictions aimed at removing women from public society.
The letter, issued by the Taliban’s Ministry of Economy, is aimed at the NGOs themselves. It states, “All institutions are directed to suspend the work of all female employees until further notice.” Furthermore, the Taliban warns that licences of NGOs will be revoked by the Ministry of Economy if they violate or disobey the implementation of the order.
The letter states the Taliban’s reason for banning women’s work in NGOs: that women do not observe the hijab and other edicts from the Taliban.
The fear is that many humanitarian NGOs will shut down their operations in Afghanistan rather than openly discriminate against women. The effect of such a move would be catastrophic. The United Nations estimates that a record 28 million Afghans will need humanitarian assistance in 2023, with 20 million facing acute hunger. They depend on the billions of dollars of aid money being spent in Afghanistan by such NGOs. Women-led households would be particularly affected, as those in conservative parts of Afghanistan would likely be prevented from accepting aid packages or other held from male workers of NGOs.
This is just the latest in a series of measures aimed at excluding women from society. On December 22, the Taliban banned women and girls from attending private educational centres. Two days earlier, on December 20, they banned female students from attending universities. Both actions have been widely condemned around the world. At the very beginning of their takeover of Afghanistan, the Taliban banned girls from going to school beyond grade 6.
The United Nations has labelled the Taliban’s denial of female education as a crime against humanity. Human Rights Watch described this Taliban action as misogynistic and, like so many others, asked them to reverse their bans on female education.
Several Muslim-majority countries, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iran, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates, as well as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, have condemned the decision of the Taliban and called it both contrary to Islamic teachings and shocking.
Denying females the right to be educated has been a particular focus of the Taliban. In September 2021, the Ministry of Education opened schools for boys and girls up to grade 6 but did not allow girls in higher grades. Taliban spokesmen and diplomats insisted the ban is temporary until the group develops a mechanism for allowing girls beyond grade 6 in schools. (That was the same explanation the Taliban provided for the closure of girls’ schools when they were last in power in the nineties. However, the girls’ school never did reopen, at least not until after the Taliban regime fell in 2001.)
Recently, the Taliban sent a letter to girls’ schools in Kandahar and asked them to expel all girls older than 13. This is yet another indicator of how the Taliban leadership is hostile to girls’ education, which was also extended to women in universities.
The recent bans on women in universities and educational centres are the culmination of a methodical campaign to eliminate women from higher education. Earlier in the fall, when high school graduates sat down to take entrance exams, they discovered that the Taliban had removed at least 13 fields from the female exam booklets – ranging from law and computer science to economics and agriculture. The girls were left with three options: medicine, education, and sharia.”
In addition, the Taliban have deprived most women of the right to work, including ordering female government workers to immediately stop working after the Taliban takeover in 2021. And every day the scope of these restrictions is increased. Recently, the Taliban introduced new rules against businesswomen trading and dealing with male clients and employers, which effectively makes it impossible for women to continue to make a living by their trades. As well, the Taliban are introducing more and more rules preventing male businessmen from interacting with women – tailors in Herat have been beaten and arrested for conducting business with women via smartphones. Even before many of these measures were introduced, the cost to Afghanistan’s GDP of excluding women from society was estimated to be at least US$1 billion annually.
They have also denied women the ability to travel without mahram, participation in social and political activities, going to amusement parks, and other freedoms. The Taliban are also imposing their regressive clothing requirements on both men and women, and are even stopping people at checkpoints to interrogate them on their knowledge of daily prayers.
