Majority of Afghan Girls Are Not in School

Paul McGeough reports for The Sydney Morning Herald that “more than 200 schools have been attacked since early last year,” and that “the attacks have left entire districts without schools, teachers and educational aid groups.” He reports that “Taliban brutality is forcing thousands of children to stay at home in fear for their lives or to face years in front of a blackboard in dilapidated tents.”

According to the report, “a senior education official in Kabul named three establishment members among ‘influential figures’ whose involvement in land grabs around the capital had blocked the building of 20 schools for which international funds had been allocated.”

McGeough says that “the media has reported extensively on educational advances in Afghanistan,” but that “the majority of girls in the country are still not at school and one-third of districts do not have girls’ schools.” In his article McGeough reports that “insecurity, social resistance and insufficient resources are partly to blame for the crisis.”

McGeough says that in Qualala Pushta, one of Kabul’s wealthier suburbs, “hundreds of girls are being schooled under canvas because housing developers associated with Qayum Karzai, a brother of the President, had commandeered the land on which their school was to be built.”

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