When the barrier to school is a signature

In March 2022, Afghan girls put on their uniforms and went to school. Secondary schools had been announced as reopening that morning. Some girls had waited seven months for the day. They arrived, and were sent home.

I have worked in education in emergencies for nine years, four of them advising Afghanistan's Ministry of Education and chairing the national Education Cluster, and I still think about that morning more than almost anything else I have seen in this work. Not because it was the most violent thing, or the most destructive. Because of how quiet it was. No shelling, no flood, no burned classroom. A decision was taken, and 2.2 million adolescent girls stopped being students.

That is the part of this crisis the sector has still not fully absorbed. We built our entire emergency architecture around interruption by catastrophe. Schools destroyed, families displaced, roads impassable. Afghanistan today has the largest identifiable out-of-school population in the world, and it is not primarily produced by bombs, or distance, or poverty, though all three are present in abundance. It is produced by policy.

The numbers, and what they conceal

Fifty-eight per cent of school-aged girls in Afghanistan were not attending school in the last school year, against twenty-seven per cent of boys. Among girls aged thirteen to seventeen, attendance in formal secondary school is effectively zero. Eighty-one per cent of boys the same age are enrolled. Since August 2021 the de facto authorities have issued at least 470 directives touching humanitarian work, seventy-nine of them concerning women and girls specifically. UNESCO projects that if this holds, close to four million girls will have been denied secondary education by 2030, at an economic cost of roughly 9.6 billion dollars by 2066. That last figure is about two-thirds of what the entire country produces in a year.

I have watched these numbers get quoted in a hundred meetings, and I have noticed what they do. They make the crisis sound like weather. Something that arrived. The more useful way to read them is as a ledger of decisions, because decisions can be argued with, and weather cannot.

Meanwhile the emergency that looks like a classic emergency has been getting worse underneath. More than five million Afghans have returned from Iran and Pakistan in two years, 2.61 million in 2025 alone, roughly 900,000 of them children. Most came back involuntarily, without savings and often without documents, into provinces that were already stretched. In the high-return provinces I have seen teacher-to-student ratios of one to seventy, against the one to thirty or forty that a functioning classroom needs. Two-thirds of recently returned children are out of school entirely. The country is in a sixth consecutive year of drought. Sixty-five per cent of the population lives in multidimensional poverty, three-quarters of them in rural areas.

So a girl in Herat is now excluded twice: once by a directive that closed her school, and again by an economy and a climate that would have made attendance hard even if the directive vanished tomorrow. We tend to fund one of those crises at a time.

The thing nobody wants to say out loud

Here is the uncomfortable centre of this work. In Afghanistan the authority you must negotiate with to build anything durable is the same authority producing the most severe exclusions. There is no version of this where you get to work around that. You either engage, carefully, with clear red lines, or you accept that whatever you build lasts exactly as long as your grant does.

Principle without presence is a press release. Presence without principle is complicity. The work lives in the narrow space between them, and that space has to be defended every single week.

I have sat on both sides of that table, as a ministry adviser and now as a penholder designing what comes next. What I have learned is that the sector's instinct to resolve this tension by declaration, in either direction, is the least useful thing we do. Announcing that we will not engage abandons eight million children who are still in classrooms. Announcing that we will engage without conditions hands over the only leverage we have. Neither is a strategy. Both are ways of avoiding the daily, unglamorous negotiation that actually keeps schools open.

What actually works, and why we underfund it

The good news is that we are not guessing. Between 2023 and 2026, a thirty-million-dollar multi-year programme ran across sixteen provinces and seventy-six districts, and despite policy shocks that suspended classes mid-cycle, it reached 97.2 per cent of its enrolment targets for out-of-school children. It enrolled children with disabilities at 9.6 per cent, against a sector norm of two to three per cent. Those are not modest results in a stable country. In that country, in those years, they are remarkable.

They came from a short list of things, and the list is boring, which is probably why it keeps getting ignored.

Community-based education proved the most resilient way to teach anyone. When classes were suspended, it was village shuras, school management committees, elders and religious leaders who reopened them, in some cases building the classrooms themselves. Local organisations, once they were genuinely resourced rather than subcontracted, delivered under conditions no international agency could operate in. Donor flexibility mattered more than donor volume: the ability to reprogramme in weeks rather than quarters is what preserved those targets. And psychosocial support and teacher mentoring turned out not to be the soft extras we cut first, but the reason learning outcomes moved at all.

Now look at how that work is financed. The education response in Afghanistan asked for sixty million dollars this year to reach about 614,000 children. It has received less than a third. We know precisely what works, we have measured it, and we fund it at a level that guarantees we cannot do it at scale.

What I would ask of the people who decide

Fund longer. A one-year cycle in a context like this buys you a project, not a system. Communities will not invest their own labour and land in a classroom that might close in eleven months, and they are right not to.

Fund local, and mean it. Not local implementation of foreign design, which is subcontracting with better optics. Local organisations in the room when the design is made, with the finance, compliance and operational support that makes the responsibility survivable rather than extractive.

Build the crisis into the budget. Afghanistan will have another earthquake, another displacement wave, another drought year. Contingency written into the programme from day one, with agreed triggers, is the difference between responding in three weeks and responding in nine months.

And stop treating girls' education as a category we report on. In Afghanistan it is the single largest determinant of whether an entire generation is literate. Every accelerated learning class, every community-based class that a girl can reach, every negotiation that keeps one more grade open, is not a workaround. Right now it is the main line of effort.

Why I keep doing this

I grew up around this system. My own education was shaped by the same country that is now producing the largest out-of-school population on earth. When people ask why the sector should keep investing in a place where the policy environment is this hostile, the honest answer is not a moral one, though the moral one holds. It is that the children are there now. Four million girls will not be un-denied their education in 2030 by a statement issued in 2026. They are eleven and thirteen and sixteen today, and what they get in the next four years is what they will carry for fifty.

The directives may change. Governments change; this one will not be the last. What will not come back is the decade a generation spent waiting for adults to resolve their positions. That is the emergency. Everything else is scheduling.