• Friday, February 07, 2025
• Inter Press Service
• The author is an Afghanistan-based female journalist, trained with Finnish support before the Taliban take-over. Her identity is withheld for security reasons

Feb 07 (IPS) - Since the Taliban regained power in Afghanistan in 2021, girls and women have been systematically banned from education, making Afghanistan the only country in the world that denies schooling to girls over the age of 12. The situation continues to deteriorate, with even primary school enrollment for girls in decline, according to UNESCO.

With female teachers barred from instructing boys, a shortage of educators has further deepened the crisis.

In this bleak landscape, online education has emerged as the only hope for an estimated 1.4 million Afghan girls over the age of 12, desperate to continue learning. Yet, this alternative is fraught with formidable obstacles.

Barriers to Online Learning

Afghanistan’s poor internet infrastructure and unstable electricity supply make remote education unreliable.

While the situation of electricity in urban centres is relatively better than in the rural areas, it still does not guarantee easy access to online learning to everyone. The amount of money needed for equipment such as computers, tablets and smartphones is beyond what most low-income Afghans families can afford.

Besides that, due to impromptu power outages in Afghanistan, online learning is problematic. Electricity can suddenly go off without prior notice and often for several hours. Frequent instances of such events make it increasingly difficult to hold online lessons and students are unable to download learning material from the internet or do their assignments.

In Afghanistan, online education courses do not have universal recognition, and no public entity provides them.

Besides the poor infrastructure, parents are afraid that the Taliban may be secretly tracking online education, and if caught, their daughters could bring substantial difficulties to the whole family.

An Afghan father who has an 18-year-old daughter expressed his despair. “My daughter has always wished to study law, he said, “in order to fight for justice for women in a country where women’s rights are routinely ignored, but now she cannot study peacefully at her own home”.

He went on to outline the typical problems, “we don't have electricity, the internet is down, and if the Taliban find out that she is studying online, her life might be in danger, and we all will be in trouble”.

More often than not, the home environment does not allow for uninterrupted studies, especially in large families due to congestion of space.

A Network of Learning, Despite the Risks

Many of these online educational institutions, about 33 altogether, are available across several countries in the West and in the South Asian region, with four operating inside Afghanistan.

They provide quality education in a vast range of subject areas such as medical sciences, economics, engineering, computer science and information technology, business management, law, art, and social sciences.

Mainstream media platforms such as television, radio and newspapers are under the tight censorship of the Taliban, and therefore of little use as sources of beneficial information. But fortunately, students can conveniently turn to social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram and Telegram for additional supplementary information.

However, even though faced with numerous challenges in pursuing online education, it has nevertheless produced positive outcomes, which has kept hopes alive for a better future for girls who unfortunately, have been abandoned by the Taliban.

Among the individual success stories is Raihana, one of the few girls who has had the opportunity to study economics at an online university.

“Despite all the difficulties and challenges “I have experienced during this time she says, “I remain hopeful”.

According to Raihana, studying online allows her to connect with other students globally and it enables her gain different perspectives.

“I want to tell other girls never to give up, even if the conditions seem difficult”, she says.

"Adding further, “every day, I think about how I will one day return to society and help my community so that more girls have the right to education”.

© Inter Press Service (2025) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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