On the International Day of Education for Women and Girls, education is often discussed in terms of access: Who is allowed to enter a classroom, who is denied schooling, who is excluded by law or policy? In the case of Afghanistan, this conversation has been both urgent and necessary. Yet after years of documenting exclusion, a more analytically demanding question now emerges: What happens to education when institutions no longer function,and who carries knowledge forward when formal systems collapse?
Afghanistan represents one of the most extreme cases of territorial exclusion from education. Universities are closed to women and secondary schooling is suspended as the Taliban has systematically dismantled the institutional architecture of learning. But education itself has not disappeared. Instead, it has reconfigured, moving beyond classrooms, borders, and state permission.
In this transformation, Afghan women are not merely preserving learning; they are actively rebuilding education as a transnational, distributed, and woman-led practice.
This is not a story of survival. It is a story of academic labour, intellectual continuity, and the emergence of new educational forms that challenge long-held assumptions about where knowledge resides and who is authorized to produce it.
Education without borders
For much of modern history, education has been inseparable from territory. Universities, schools, laboratories, and libraries have been anchored to nation-states, regulated by ministries, and legitimized through formal accreditation. When these structures are removed, education is typically assumed to vanish with them.
Afghanistan disrupts this assumption.
As institutional access has been withdrawn, learning has not stopped but has migrated. Education now flows through informal networks, encrypted digital platforms, diaspora classrooms, mentorship chains, and peer-to-peer teaching arrangements that span both continents and time zones. Afghan women inside the country and across the diaspora have become the primary architects of this deterritorialized educational ecosystem.
In this sense, Afghanistan is a case study in transnational learning that reveals how knowledge systems adapt under extreme constraint.
Afghan women as founders of transnational classrooms
Crucially, Afghan women are not solely positioned as beneficiaries within this ecosystem. They are educators, curriculum designers, mentors, and coordinators. They design syllabi, organize teaching schedules around electricity shortages and internet instability, mentor students they may never meet in person, and use the internet to transmit their expertise, which has been acquired through years of formal training before institutional collapse.
These efforts are not isolated or anecdotal. In the past several years, Afghan diaspora individuals and organizations have built a dense, parallel educational infrastructure that spans schooling, higher education preparation, professional training, and academic mentorship. While varying in scale and visibility, together these initiatives function as distributed education systems operating alongside,and often independently of,formal institutions.
At the school and secondary level, diaspora-led programs have emerged to maintain continuity of learning for girls excluded from formal classrooms. Initiatives include Learn Afghanistan, Daricha Education, Free to Learn Afghanistan, and Coursera courses. They provide structured online curricula, language instruction, and core academic subjects. These programs function as shadow schooling systems in an informal yet systematic way, thus ensuring that educational progression does not halt entirely.
Beyond schooling, a significant portion of diaspora-led education focuses on university preparation and academic mobility. Organizations such as Afghan Female Students for Change and technology-focused initiatives like Code to Inspire support language training, academic writing, application guidance, and professional skill development. In some cases, these efforts are complemented by partnerships with global education actors, including initiatives supported through Education Cannot Wait.
In parallel, Afghan women professionals and scientists have established discipline-specific training programs, particularly in STEM fields. Networks such as Afghan Girls in STEM, STEM committee of AEC, STEM for Her Afghanistan, and She Codes Afghanistan offer virtual courses, workshops, and career-oriented training. These initiatives are notable not for their emergency framing, but for their emphasis on long-term intellectual and professional development.
Mentorship as academic infrastructure
Mentorship has become one of the most critical, yet least visible, components of this transnational education ecosystem. In the absence of formal supervision structures, Afghan women academics and professionals have assumed mentoring roles traditionally performed by institutions.
Global networks such as Afghan Women in STEM pair students with mentors across disciplines, while advocacy-linked organizations such as Women for Afghan Women integrate educational counselling and leadership development into broader support frameworks. Alongside these formal networks, hundreds of individual educators mentor students informally through sustained, trust-based relationships,often without organizational affiliation, funding, or public recognition.
These mentorship models do more than offer guidance. They reproduce academic culture: teaching how to think, write, present, critique, and persist. In doing so, they preserve the epistemic norms of higher education even when institutions themselves are inaccessible.
Public scholarship and intellectual continuity
Online lectures, webinars, and academic forums have further sustained intellectual life across borders. Platforms such as Afghan Women in Science and international scientific organizations including OWSD provide spaces for Afghan women scholars to present research, exchange ideas, and remain visible within global academic conversations.
These forums are not symbolic. They function as sites of knowledge validation, allowing Afghan women to maintain scholarly identity and contribute intellectually despite exclusion from physical campuses and laboratories.
Scale, persistence, and a parallel system
It is difficult to offer a precise quantification of the scale of the new offerings due to security constraints and the informal nature of many initiatives. However, conservative synthesis of publicly available information indicates:
- Dozens of active diaspora-led organizations explicitly focused on Afghan women’s education;
- Hundreds of individual educators and mentors operating independently or semi-formally; and
- Thousands of learners are participating annually across schooling, university preparation, and professional training.
What matters analytically is not only scale, but persistence. Many of these initiatives have operated continuously for several years, adapting to shifting political and technological constraints.
Taken together, they constitute a parallel, transnational education system that is characterized by distributed leadership, cross-border instruction, informal accreditation through reputation and outcomes, and a strong orientation toward future knowledge production.
From national loss to global insight
While rooted in Afghanistan’s specific conditions, this educational reconfiguration carries global significance. As conflict, authoritarianism, displacement, and climate disruption increasingly destabilize education systems worldwide, such transnational and informal learning models are likely to become more common.
Afghan women are unintentionally pioneering an educational form that challenges the assumption that legitimate knowledge must be institutionally sanctioned. What is emerging is not simply education under constraint, but a prototype of education without borders.
The challenge for the international community is not only how to restore access to education in Afghanistan but also how to recognize, support, and learn from the educational infrastructures being built by Afghan women.
Doing so requires shifting from an access-centered narrative to one that acknowledges educational practice, authorship, and authority beyond institutions.
Education as practice, not permission
Education does not begin with authorization. It begins with commitment. It persists through teaching without titles, mentoring without contracts, and learning without classrooms.
On this International Day of Education for Women and Girls, Afghan women remind us that when universities fall silent, knowledge does not disappear. It moves. It adapts. And it is carried forward by those who refuse to let education end.
Dr. Amna Mehmood is a senior scientist and science educator whose work focuses on sustaining STEM education and scientific identity among Afghan women under conditions of educational exclusion. Dr. Amna Mehmood is a molecular biologist and senior scientist at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany.
