UNESCO dedicates World Education Day 2023 to Afghan girls and women

The UNESCO Advocacy campaign has reached more than 20 million Afghans to raise public awareness of the right to education for youth and adults, especially adolescent girls and women. UNESCO also partnered with NGOs on the ground, providing content and funding to start a community literacy campaign that targeted 25,000 youth and adults in rural areas, including adolescent girls over 15 and women.

To reach as many girls and women as possible, UNESCO is also working to provide distance education through Afghan media, especially radio stations. Radio is available to more than two-thirds of the population and has the advantage of being available directly in homes.

Thanks to its many donors, UNESCO supports broadcasters to produce conflict-sensitive, humanitarian, health and educational content of public interest, with the aim of reaching at least six million Afghans, with a special focus on women and girls. This includes direct support for a women-run station that will produce more than 200 hours per month of educational content tailored to girls and women, to be broadcast in at least eight counties across the country by 2023.

Every day without education hinders progress since 2001

But nothing can replace the classroom, a place of social integration, where you learn to live together, where students and teachers participate in the educational process. For this reason, UNESCO and its Member States will continue to advocate for the right to education of Afghan girls and women to occupy a priority place on the international agenda.

The decisions of the de facto authorities in Afghanistan threaten to undermine the development gains the country has made in the past 20 years. Between 2001 and 2021, Afghanistan increased its enrollment at all levels of education tenfold, from about 1 million students to about 10 million, with the support of the international community, including UNESCO.

During that period, the number of girls enrolled in primary school rose from almost zero to 2.5 million. Women’s participation in Afghan higher education has also increased nearly 20-fold, from 5,000 students to more than 100,000. Women’s literacy rates have nearly doubled, from 17% of women literate in 2001 to nearly 30% for all age groups combined in 2021.