A UNESCO advocacy campaign reached more than 20 million Afghans to raise public awareness of the right to education for young people and adults, particularly adolescent girls and women. UNESCO has also partnered with local NGOs, providing content and funding to implement a community-based literacy campaign targeting 25,000 rural youth and adults, mainly adolescent girls over 15 and women
In order to reach as many girls and women as possible, UNESCO is also working to offer distance learning through Afghan media, especially radio stations. Radio is accessible to more than two-thirds of the population and has the advantage of being directly available in homes.
Thanks to numerous donors, UNESCO supports broadcasters in the production of conflict-sensitive, humanitarian, health and education-promoting 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 channel that will produce more than 200 hours a month of educational content for girls and women, which will be broadcast in at least eight provinces across the country by 2023.
Since 2001, every day without education hampers progress
But nothing can replace the classroom, which is a place of social integration, where one learns to live together, where students and teachers participate in the educational process. For this reason, UNESCO and its Member States will continue to work to ensure that the right to education of Afghan girls and women is a priority on the international agenda.
The decisions of the de facto authorities in Afghanistan threaten to undo the country’s development gains over the past 20 years. Between 2001 and 2021, with the support of the international community, including UNESCO, Afghanistan increased its enrollment tenfold at all levels of education, from about 1 million to about 10 million.
During that time, the number of girls attending primary school rose from almost zero to 2.5 million. Female participation in Afghan higher education has also increased almost twenty-fold, from 5,000 students to over 100,000. Female literacy rates have nearly doubled, from 17% of women literate in 2001 to nearly 30% for all ages combined in 2021.