Afghanistan Peace Campaign 
The closure of schools for girls beyond grade six is the most glaring example of the Emirate’s discrimination against women and girls. Without access to secondary and higher education, most teenage girls and young women see little hope for a future beyond family life. But for some, the restrictions are not absolute. Whether through their own initiatives or those of their communities or NGOs, some Afghan girls are finding opportunities to learn beyond grade six, particularly in the virtual realm. Rachel Reid, with input from Rama Mirzada, has been hearing from students and teachers about the rewards and limitations of informal education.
Being a student in my position is a bittersweet experience. On the one hand, I feel incredibly resilient and proud that, while many doors have been closed to girls, I’m still standing and fighting for my right to learn. On the other hand, it feels heavy. It’s not just about books for us; it’s about carrying the weight of the uncertainty about our future.
Sima is one of the lucky few – a teenage girl in Afghanistan who is managing to continue her studies. Six days a week, she attends grade 11 via online classes. With girls’ secondary schools closed since 2021, this is more than most Afghan girls can dream of. But hers is not an isolated story.
Older girls’ continuing education is a grey area: while the vast majority remain excluded, nobody counts how many girls have found a way to keep studying, either because it is done unofficially, circumventing restrictions, or because of the fragility of efforts that are outside formal education but have a degree of state sanction. This report will focus on the unofficial, alternative end of the spectrum, for those excluded from grades 7-12. These efforts range from very small and local, such as student-driven efforts to help each other’s continuing education or the efforts of a determined teacher to keep girls in her own community learning, to larger-scale schemes run by NGOs offering physical, online or hybrid classes, often from outside the country. Some follow the old school curriculum of the Republic or international curricula, others offer a more informal medley of courses, from literacy to coding. The educational landscape for older girls has also changed since 2021-22, as this report details: some of what was safe early on may now feel risky, with far more happening online than is possible in person.
There was much attention – understandably – on the courage of those running clandestine schools in the first years after the Emirate seized power. As that power has consolidated, with enforcers exerting more control over society, including education, some providers of underground education have been forced either to close or pivot to online learning, while others have chosen to move to at least some digital provision to increase access. Others collaborate with providers of video and radio content, as explored in a 2025 AAN report on radio education. There are also pockets of learning for older girls that are outside the formal system but state-sanctioned to some degree, although that is not the focus of this report.
This paper focuses on the unofficial ways in which girls are managing to keep learning beyond sixth grade (approximately aged 12-13 upwards). It focuses on alternative learning channels, primarily online. It is based on 28 interviews – nine students,[1] seven teachers or psychologists working directly with physical or virtual schools and twelve key informants working for or running NGOs delivering education services. Of the students, three were interviewed remotely, the others shared voice notes of their experiences in response to voice note questions, as a means of reducing their exposure. Most were in grades 9-12, approximately aged 14-19, though ages tended to vary given the disruptions they had encountered. All of those based in Afghanistan have been given single-name pseudonyms for their own protection. Given the sensitivity of the work, identifying details of some of the educators and their work are also omitted.
Background: girls’ education before 2021
Education has been far from universal in Afghanistan, regardless of the prevailing political winds. Children in rural areas, particularly girls, were often excluded, given the mix of conservative gender attitudes, high levels of poverty and low levels of development, including literacy, as well as decades of conflict. Formal education in schools has always been supplemented by madrasa education or other community-based learning.
Under the first Taliban rule in the 1990s, all girls’ schooling, including primary education, was banned. However, it was not a uniform picture, particularly for younger girls in rural areas (AAN). Pockets of education for girls continued, organised by communities, Afghan NGOs and educators, often in homes or community buildings, often in secret. The writer, Axana Soltan, studied in a secret basement school, thanks to her mother’s determination, as she recalled for the HuffPost: “when I turned seven, she wrapped my books in grocery bags, dressed me in my brothers’ clothing and sent me to an underground secret school for girls.” Not all girls’ education was clandestine – some NGOs negotiated permission to run girls’ schools from the authorities (AAN). In 2000, AAN’s Kate Clark visited a girls’ primary school in the capital and a mixed primary school in Kabul province run by an NGO. However, while some schools had permission to teach girls, it could always be revoked or officials might choose one day not to ‘look the other way’. Teachers and students always risked punishment.
Under the Islamic Republic, more schools were built, teachers were trained and investment was made to enrol children across the country. For girls, the increase was dramatic – from a fraction of girls enrolled in primary school in 2001 to over 80 per cent in 2021, according to UNESCO, though the actual number of school students was always lower than the corruption-inflated figures claimed (mostly through ‘ghost’ schools and teachers, which existed only as a budget line) (AAN). The jump was not as big for older girls, however, with around 45 per cent of girls finishing grade nine in 2019, compared to 75 per cent of boys (World Bank).
Access to education varied by geography. In areas where the conflict raged, schools were often caught in the firing line, with teachers’ and students’ access imperilled. In areas where the Taliban took control, they sometimes banned or indirectly prevented older girls from going to school, particularly prior to 2009. After that, in areas under their control, they tended towards a more passive role, allowing girls’ access where it already existed, at least in primary schools, though these were often rural communities where girls’ access was already quite low (AAN). For children in remote or hard-to-reach areas, efforts were made to reach them through a parallel system of community-based education, which often involved classes in homes or mosques, mostly provided by the United Nations and international NGOs and often prioritising girls (UNICEF). So, overall, the Republic offered a mixed picture, though certainly one marked by a strong trend towards greater access.
Closing the door on older girls’ education
Within weeks of seizing power in August 2021, the Emirate ordered the reopening of primary and secondary schools for boys. In theory, the wait for secondary-age girls to go back to school was temporary, with various justifications given. Indeed, at the start of the next school year, on 23 March 2022, girls’ secondary schools did open, but within hours the Taliban’s leader, Amir Hibatullah Akhundzada, ordered them shut and the girls were sent home – this time for good. (AAN’s account of the full, convoluted tale, including the arguments over this issue within the movement, was published later that week).
Afghans who had lived through the first Taliban Emirate may not have been surprised by this, but many students were blindsided. Zolaikha was a year away from finishing grade 12 when the Taliban seized power. She told AAN that for her, the new rulers were just an abstract idea: “I didn’t really understand what the Taliban really were until the spring of the year after they took over.” During the Covid-19 pandemic, schools had been closed, then the situation was confusing in the autumn of 2021 – while a few provinces opened girls’ secondary schools, most did not. Zolaikha’s school remained closed until the new school year began on 23 March. On her first day back, she initially just noticed that the class size had shrunk:
People had been talking about whether we’d still be able to go back to school, but I couldn’t believe they’d stop girls studying. Then after just an hour or two in class, the principal came and said, “I’m sorry, they’ve cancelled girls’ education until further notice, so you need to go home.” Just like that. It was such a shock.
Among the many justifications, an insistence on gender segregation, for both girls and female teachers, was the most prominent. “I was so, so mad,” said Zolaikha. “In my school, girls and boys were already separated, we were in different buildings, so it made no sense to send us home.”
What was officially claimed as a temporary ban, however, was followed by a series of additional barriers to education for girls and women, which made the wider intent clear.[2] They included closing private educational centres for girls beyond grade six, preventing women from attending universities in December 2022 (Zan Times) and barring medical training for women and girls in December 2024 (BBC). There are also indirect barriers to girls’ education, such as Emirate restrictions on women’s ability to travel and work. Other obstacles that had also existed under the Republic persisted, for example, conservative families or communities and financial constraints. All told, the UN estimates that since the Emirate seized power, restrictions on education beyond grade six have directly affected at least 1.5 million girls (UNESCO, p1).
While the impact of these restrictions is profound, they are not absolute. Officially, madrasas remain open to older girls, although what girls are taught varies hugely: some focus on religious studies, while others provide core subjects such as maths, science and social studies.[3] Standards also vary: one girl in the capital described to AAN how, during the Republic, religious education at school had been to a far higher standard than anything she had found in a madrasa.
There has also been some non-formal education for adolescent girls taking place outside the state system but with a degree of state sanction, though these have faced growing scrutiny. They include programmes by UN agencies, international NGOs and Afghan NGOs registered with the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA). Some are vocational education programmes, such as embroidery, computing and language classes, some of which are (or were) open to older girls.[4] Interviewees said that accelerated learning programmes, which mostly provide an ‘accelerated’ catch-up for those who missed primary education, also sometimes include adolescent girls. Community-based education (CBE) also provided a little leeway for older girls – for a while at least. The number of students enrolled in CBE classes held in community buildings, homes and mosques, peaked in 2023 at around 1 million, of whom 60 per cent were girls (UNICEF, 2025, p11). But in 2023, the IEA began restricting CBE programmes, first closing CBE classes in two provinces in April, then informing international NGOs and the UN to hand over management of CBE programmes to the local authorities or registered Afghan NGOs (RFE/RL).[5]
Alternative education
Unofficially, there is a complex web of informal education being provided without state sanction, sometimes described as ‘alternative education’, which is the focus of this report. This includes online education, which seems to attract little attention from the authorities and is often provided by educators who had already been offering tech solutions to education during the pandemic and before, as well as by new actors in the field. Some families or communities have taken the high-risk approach of creating ‘secret schools’ or classrooms based mostly in homes or other community locations, without permission, as many communities had done under the previous era of Taliban rule. As the education restrictions hardened, however, some of these providers have been forced to shut classes down or shift their work into the virtual realm.
One example of the latter is LEARN Afghan, founded by Pashtana Durrani in her home province of Kandahar in 2018. It began working in fairly conservative communities, finding different ways of getting girls into education, including digital education, teacher training and working with existing schools to add accelerated learning. After the Republic fell, there was a limbo: “Although the ban was not yet there, they were not opening the schools either,” Durrani told AAN. “People tend to forget that it had been COVID and the schools were closed, so the girls went from COVID into the Taliban regime without having exposure to school.”
Initially, she opened a school in Kandahar in October 2021, expecting it to be a “temporary lifeline” for two or three months. But as the months passed and there was still no sign of girls’ secondary schools reopening, she was approached by someone in central Afghanistan who had heard about what she was doing in Kandahar. “Although it was a very different ethnicity and different geography, the thing we had in common was that their girls couldn’t go to school like our girls.” They went ahead. Soon after, they received a request from a community in the northeast and within four years, LEARN Afghan was in 25 provinces, providing a mix of in-person and online learning.
Informal schools like these grew, mostly under the radar, all over the country. Interviewees told AAN of both the opportunity and the high cost of operating in the shadows. Student Khadija attends a community school operated by another NGO, Daricha:
We fear people may discover we’re studying. We fear going to the course and not returning home safely. We fear that death or injury could happen at any moment. We fear the Taliban may find out we’re continuing our education. These fears are a part of our daily lives, but still we continue because education means hope for us.
The only way to navigate this degree of risk, for those determined to defy the ban, is through strong community ownership. Durrani says that when they are approached by a community, they are very clear about who takes responsibility for security from the outset:
We say we’re going to provide you with laptops, salaries, internet, teacher training, curriculum, pedagogy training, everything you need, but you need to provide the security because it’s your community, you have the understanding around it and you need to make sure that you have a security parameter.
The students and teachers are selected by the community, providing another level of protection. Roya, in western Afghanistan, works for another NGO that sets up schools in homes, with “trustworthy schoolteachers” and “trusted students.” The discretion they ask for, though, is also designed to manage a level of demand that is higher than they can meet:
When we enrol a student, we ask that she doesn’t inform other candidates because there are many families who want to send their daughters, but we cannot manage them all. This shows the community’s support for education: everyone wants to enrol their daughters, but the office does not have a big enough budget to support them.
The levels of vigilance required vary from province to province, says Durrani. In some provinces, “[the schools] are secret. Nobody tells anybody anything.” Only the teachers know where the students gather, and she is confident that even when they move on, “they don’t go and snitch on us. It’s that simple because they know they’re part of an ecosystem that has to be secret.” However, in other provinces, “there is less pressure, the wider community knows.” This does not necessarily mean that the local authorities are tolerating them, Durrani says. It may be that the school is “completely ignored or is under surveillance – you never know which.”
Durrani, like many of those running such programmes, now lives in exile. Those taking the greatest risks tend to be the teachers, particularly when they have to travel to teach. Mina has been teaching at a school run by another Afghan NGO for two years. She says that holding classes in someone’s home is “the only way we can be sure that the government don’t know about us. But it’s dangerous. I worry about this, in case we have any problems with the government.”
Mina says the risk is personally worthwhile: her work gives her a sense of purpose in an otherwise difficult time. Her dream had been to become a doctor, but when the Taliban took over, she pivoted to training as a midwife, until that road, too, was blocked. “At first, when I decided to become a teacher, it was very hard, it didn’t feel real, with all my dreams gone,” she admitted, “but now that I am teaching, I feel so much better. I learned to laugh with the students. I feel responsible for them; a teacher should treat her students as she treats her own children.”
Some NGOs lower the risk threshold by having teachers join remotely while students gather in person. AAN talked to two NGOs that have adopted this practice at least in some of their locations. Roya is employed by one of them to provide psychological support to students. For this, she does need to visit in person:
The teachers at these schools teach in their own homes and know their students. But for people like me, the situation is different because we don’t know anyone at those schools. When I commute between my house and the schools, there is fear in my heart. I am afraid of being stopped at the checkpoints or followed by someone.
She hasn’t had problems so far, which she says is partly because she closely observes the dress code for women. Mina, who teaches at an underground school in an eastern province, also relies on her clothing for protection. “For now,” she said, when she travels to work, “I just wear a big scarf,” and “they haven’t stopped me so far.” She needs textbooks, but “I can’t take anything in my hands,” so she uses digital copies, in case she gets stopped on her way. She teaches maths, English and biology.
They don’t want us to do this, they don’t want girls to learn, they don’t want them to study, they have so many problems with girls. They say they shouldn’t study ‘foreign’ subjects, they shouldn’t study mathematics, chemistry, physics. These [subjects] are not for girls. You should only teach girls the Quran.
More pressure from the authorities
Operating under the radar has become harder as restrictions on girls’ education have been formalised and the Amir’s grip on power has tightened.[6] Enforcers from the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice now conduct regular inspections of places of learning, including schools, madrasas and official community-based education (UNAMA 2025, p14 and UNAMA 2026, p4). The General Directorate of Intelligence (GDI) has detained education workers and activists, including some high-profile cases, such as Wazir Khan, who was detained for a month in March 2025 (Kabul Now) and Matiullah Wesa, who was held for over 200 days in 2023 (Al Jazeera). AAN is aware of several additional cases that have not been made public.
Over time, as these pressures mounted, physical classrooms have become harder to sustain. One Afghan NGO worker told AAN:
There was a tightening up across the country and the Taliban started coming after NGOs in this sector. Our NGO was a target because we had a lot of students. It started in 2021, but in 2024 they got really harsh.
A 2025 report by the Women and Children’s Research Organisation on the impact of the education ban noted a crackdown against “informal and underground schools,” starting in mid-2023, with “community-based learning circles harassed and dismantled” (pp6-7). Beneath the surface of such harassment, there can be more than a straightforward enforcement of the law. In 2024, LEARN Afghan had a colleague detained when auditing a school. “They were arrested and tortured for almost six months,” said Durrani. Her assumption is that the local authorities had been wrongly tipped off that she was coming in person and that they were probably hoping to detain her for extortion, since she comes from a well-known southern family. “So, it might be about what they can get out of it – the Taliban can be very transactional.”
Another interviewee working for an education NGO was aware of two incidents where education workers had been detained. In both cases, the arrests appeared to have been triggered by parents who had reported the school. In one example, a tip-off meant “the head was jailed and tortured, [but] with the intervention of elders, he was released.” The school was able to continue in some form. In the other example, “a girl had refused child marriage, she was saying ‘I want to continue my studies.’ The father became angry and reported the school to the Taliban.” The school was shut down.
Other schools, however, have reached a local accommodation. One of AAN’s student interviewees, Tamana, said: “The enforcers came to my class twice,” but “they take a bribe from the school” so it can stay open. This does not stop her from fearing the enforcers’ return and the possibility of being arrested. Student Ghazal similarly recalled that “when there were rumours that the Emirate would search house-to-house, I used to hide my books and notebooks.” However, her fear, she said, remains.
A shift towards hybrid and online schools
After an initial expansion of home-schooling efforts, education providers have had to be more cautious. Many shifted to online learning, both for safety and in hopes of reaching more girls, since underground schools tend to require very cohesive communities. There are lots of hybrid variants, too, with tuition via radio or the internet, as well as in-person elements such as when students need to conduct a science experiment or sit an exam. This flexibility cuts the risk without sacrificing all the benefits of in-person study.
Setarah is in grade 12 and studies online in a class of women aged 18-22 for five hours a day, six days a week. She explained her school’s learning system:
Our teachers record lessons for us, which we watch at home. The system is student-centred learning, so after watching the videos, we prepare for a presentation and join our classes in the evening. … For the first 30 minutes or so of each class, the students explain what they’ve learned, one by one, and then the teacher gives more explanation and concludes the lesson.
They have midterms and final exams, all online. “The school provides us with the certificate at the end of each year, just as they did before the Taliban,” though, she says “our daily activities and attendance are more important than the exams.”
Studying online is generally cheaper in terms of enrolment and tuition fees. Setarah’s school, for example, charges 500 afghanis (USD 7.50) for enrolment but does not charge tuition. The real cost, however, is internet access and devices. “My school does not pay any money for students’ internet,” says Setarah, “but it provides some names of organisations which disadvantaged students can apply to and get some funding.”
Azizullah Paeyndah runs a digital education platform in Afghanistan, Setaragan Zirak Online School. He says that less well-off families find ways to cover their costs:
You would expect rich families to provide this opportunity for their girls, but most rich families don’t care. This matters to ordinary families, those without big incomes. The poorest people are often the most committed to learning. We can’t charge fees for some students from poor families. But for most, we charge around 1,000 afghanis [USD 15] a month for fees and another 1,000 for internet.
When Shakardokht Jafari and fellow volunteers launched an online school in 2022, now called Flying Wings, she faced significant criticism, with fellow Afghans telling her that because she lived in the UK, she did not understand the poverty trap her compatriots faced. “I respond [that] I’m from the most deprived area of Afghanistan and my cousin climbs a mountain to get a signal to change his Facebook profile. So, if [they have] the same level of enthusiasm for education, they can reach it.”
This spirit was echoed by student Setarah, who is mostly learning online. She said that in her region in central Afghanistan, “families are 100 per cent happy with our studies.” She gave the example of a classmate, “whose brother accompanies her every day to a mountain so that she can access the internet.” Other classmates, she said, have to “walk two hours to reach an area where the internet is available.”
Some providers go to great lengths to make their online content as accessible as possible, including by making all content free. The Begum Academy, which grew out of the women’s radio station, Radio Begum, provides free courses from grades 7 to 12 in 12 subjects, as well as several vocational courses. SOLAx also provides free courses in Dari, Pashto and English, with classes all delivered through WhatsApp, which requires a smartphone, but only a basic mobile connection. SOLAx grew out of the School for Leadership Afghanistan (SOLA), which was evacuated to Rwanda in 2021. They set up the online platform after receiving over 2,000 applications in 2023 from Afghan girls wanting to move to the East African country to join the school, which could offer only 31 places. They launched in 2024 and, by 2026, had over 360,000 learners, with the ambition to teach half a million Afghan girls.
Not all families or communities, however, are supportive, even of online learning. Sakina, who studies online, says she knows many girls whose education is no longer supported by their families or relatives, because they “do not believe in their abilities as students, so because of this, many girls expect to get married at a young age and stop their education.” Problems with online learning
Realistically, online learning will not be feasible for most girls. Internet access, already limited, is a luxury for families struggling financially – one in three Afghan families is in need of food assistance, according to a March 2026 World Food Programme estimate. On top of this, electricity can be patchy and women and girls tend to have more limited access to smartphones and laptops than men and boys.
“Internet access,” said student Sakina, “can sometimes make it hard to attend online classes, which affects the quality of learning. Many students can’t join their lessons on time, or follow their teacher properly and as a result, they may fall behind in their studies or lose motivation.” Virtual learning can also be a reminder for students of what they’ve lost. “Believe me, learning through a screen can be very isolating,” says Sima. “I really miss the energy of a real classroom, the face-to-face interaction with my teacher and the support of my friends.”
For educators, the move from physical to virtual learning was difficult, as teacher Shukria told AAN: “It was an unhappy time when we moved to online because most students were not familiar with online classes. It was a new experience for all of us, so we faced lots of problems.” A 2025 report by the Women and Children Research and Advocacy Network suggested that many girls who enrol in online courses drop out, mostly because of poor or unreliable internet access (report available from Princeton Library, p29).
This high dropout rate was also experienced by Shakardokht Jafari at the online school, Flying Wings. They had 500 students enrolled in their pilot year, but “attendance rates were around 20 to 25 per cent,” she told AAN. “Students struggled with digital literacy, with their internet access, with the whole system.” They adapted, however: “We created a crash course for students and teachers – there had also been resistance from teachers.” The following year, she said, attendance rates rose to 65 per cent, thanks to this crash course.
SOLAx co-founder Mati Amin says they quickly realised they could not view attendance in the same way as in a traditional school: “A girl might be using her mother’s phone, her father’s phone. She might have internet today and not tomorrow, and she may disappear for a few weeks, then come back.” That’s why they developed courses that can be accessed on a “basic smartphone with WhatsApp,” allowing families to enrol multiple girls in different classes on one shared device. “We have tried to design SOLAx around her reality. The learning is self-paced and asynchronous [on-demand] and lessons are short, so she can pick up where she left off. The idea is to let learning fit into the small windows that she has.”
Online teaching requires particular skills from teachers. Azizullah Paeyndah, who runs Setaragan Zirak Online School, says they seek candidates with a bachelor’s degree and, ideally, a master’s degree, as well as “experience of online teaching and a demonstration video of their teaching style.” He tries to build a learning culture: “Every week, we have some kind of training for [the teachers]. We come together, we speak about our education practices and methodology, we have many seminars, including best practice from other countries.” Teacher Shukria also said their teachers needed specialist training, “so that they learned how to make the lessons interesting and keep the students engaged.” However, she says the motivation levels are unquestionable:
All the teachers care so much; they aren’t just working for the salaries. They’ve been through these experiences themselves and they are all working from their hearts, so they try every day to make them more interesting.
There are, however, weaknesses in the teaching standards of both online and underground schools. Underground schools often have to resort to using one teacher per class across all subjects. Back in the Republic days, says student Ghazal:
If we were studying five subjects at school, we had five different teachers each specialising in those subjects. Here we only have one teacher who teaches all five different subjects. If the teacher is good at one subject, of course she is weak in the other subjects. Because of this, we have to use online sources like Google, ChatGPT and [other] AI. These sources are not as helpful as a teacher who can make us understand concepts in class.
There are more low-tech options for girls with limited internet access. One is the Behdukht Academy, which, says founder Fatema Uzgan, “is designed to reach village girls.” She says that girls in cities “have more opportunities, they can participate in online classes, some can even go in person to do some courses. But most of the rural girls don’t have this opportunity.” Uzgan’s motivation is very personal: when the Taliban first took power, in 1996, she was in sixth grade:
I lived in a rural district. There was no internet, no school, no courses, no nothing. So I was one of those girls who struggled to get any education at that time. … I understand what it means when life is like a prison, when you have no hope. So Behdukht is about hope.
The majority of her students, she says, “have to work to help their family financially,” so they run classes in the evenings for just a couple of hours. She initially tried live online classes, but found that only a small number of the girls could connect. So, she decided to work only with a messaging service, because “most families can only afford the one package for WhatsApp.” For each class, a teacher sends voice notes to the group, with written notes for those who do not have the bandwidth to download them:
The students are online and can ask the teacher questions. They are given homework, which they have time to complete before their next class. They must send a voice note back to the group, explaining what they learned and what they didn’t learn or understand.
Uzgan went into exile in 2021, first to Turkey and then to the United States. During the Republic, she had worked as a defence lawyer. While in the US she is “still looking for a good job” and runs Behdukht as a volunteer initiative. She sees that spirit of volunteerism in her students, with a number of girls who are now in higher grades offering to tutor those in lower grades. “They are helping each other. They want to transfer their knowledge.”
A medley of curricula and standards
The forms of alternative education on offer provide an assortment of standards, pedagogy and curricula. Uzgan, like other interviewees, says she’s not attempting to replicate what a school can offer: “These girls are a long way from getting a complete education.” Other providers have focused on meeting the academic standards of formal education, at least in terms of accreditation as the end goal. One example is the comparatively well-resourced Canadian organisation, Right to Learn Afghanistan, which set up an online school in 2022, in addition to its long-standing free online library and scholarship programme. Their school has around 700 students and teaches the old Afghan curriculum from grade seven, then transitions students to the Canadian curriculum by grade 10, using English as the medium for teaching, so that students are able to take Canadian-accredited exams at the end of grade 12.
Executive Director Lauryn Oates says, “Overall it’s a very rigorous system. … The key moment is that transition to taking classes in English in grade 10, we offer lots of support outside their classes around that time.” They experimented with on-demand classes to make it more flexible for students, but “we lost on quality.” They experience some dropouts, mostly because of struggles with the English language. Oates says they work hard to prevent dropouts “because it’s expensive [as a mode of teaching], and the students don’t pay anything. The demand is so high – we have thousands of applications every year. I get to see the applications; I have an acute sense of how coveted it is.” Oates says they keep track of a growing number of accredited learning opportunities for Afghan girls, so they can point disappointed applicants elsewhere. “There are Afghan girls studying alongside girls from other parts of the world in accredited and good quality organisations,” she says, which “range from free – with full scholarships to partial scholarships to private schools, but almost all have some kind of subsidy for Afghan girls.”
Having started out with an online school, Shakardokht Jafari soon felt that the alternative education sector was becoming “pretty much saturated,” while “the biggest missing piece was accreditation.” Jafari launched a spin-off from Flying Wings, Education Bridge for Afghanistan (EBA), which provides two types of high school diplomas, one based on the Afghan curriculum and the other aligned with UK-based qualifications. EBA now has over 250 schools as partners using the certification scheme and secure examination methodology. “Despite the risks, the demand is increasing, more people are signing up,” says Jafari. She says parents are starting to believe in the system. “Now they have seen their daughters sitting the exams, receiving the reports, they can [privately access] their grades online. It is very transparent.”
Online skills and vocational training are another growing sector, often focused on jobs that can be done remotely. Afghan Women Forward, for example, offers free courses in subjects including graphic design, programming, cybersecurity and teaching English as a foreign language. LEARN also offers skills training for a narrow range of jobs, including midwifery and computing alongside its secondary school curriculum. Durrani is realistic about the narrow funnel of opportunities her students face:
I’m not going to say, “Oh my God, it’s so easy.” No. We get to pick only 15 girls to go on to midwifery from among 100 girls. Another 15 girls to study mental health. It breaks my mind because many girls have a lot of potential, but we can only pick 40 women out of 400 for the technology programme. It’s hard.
The benefits of keeping girls in education go well beyond improving access to higher education or employment, of course, with well-documented impacts such as lower rates of child marriage, maternal mortality and child mortality (UNICEF). In addition, all interviewees stressed the psychological importance of alternative education.
Mental health and keeping motivated
Education symbolises what many girls and women have lost, both in terms of education and future careers. Recognising the widespread mental health problems among their students, many educators have added psychological support to their services. These emotional pressures exist whether students are attending underground schools or studying online, says Jafari:
When it comes to physically going to classes, sometimes the Taliban go there and have a terrible attitude towards the girls, sometimes they beat the students and teachers and sometimes they close them down. Sometimes, [the girls] have to stay home for a while. This creates stress and anxiety for teachers and students. For those who study from home, they are lonely and suffer from depression; they can lose motivation.
Psychologist Roya says that “since everything, including jobs and education opportunities, is banned for women,” depression is common. She also notes, however, that domestic stress is also increased: “because more people stay home and spend more time together, there tend to be more problems arising in the family.”
Another interviewee, Laleh, also works as a part-time psychologist. She visits home schools once a month: “Whenever I go see the girls … it feels as though they have been carrying all the psychological problems they have faced throughout the month, waiting for an opportunity to share them with me.” The students are also coping with their families’ economic problems, which for many, she says, “have forced them to go and work their land, along with the men in their families. Their parents have lost their jobs and they have no choice but to work with them to put food on the table.” This makes it difficult to find time to study.
Sima, an online student, said that sometimes it is hard to focus on “complex tenth-grade subjects when my mind is on real-world challenges.” Her description at the start of this report of studying as a “bittersweet experience” captures the tone of several interviewees: continuing her education gives her hope, but it also takes a toll: “Sometimes it’s exhausting just to be strong enough just to do something as simple as attending a class,” she said. Like her fellow students, however, she thinks it is better to study than not: “My identity as a student is what gives me hope and a sense of purpose.” For another student, Fariba, “staying disciplined” is the biggest challenge: “keeping ourselves away from getting mentally burned out and staying positive for our future life.”
Educator Azizullah Paeyndah believes that the pressure of study itself is the best remedy for these existential doubts. “When they are busy with study and homework and school activities, there is no time to think about the restrictions and adversity they face.” This is one reason they have opted for fortnightly tests. “It is hard to keep people motivated in this situation. This is the way that we create some stress for them, it keeps them regular with their study.” Jafari says regular testing helps prepare students for their end-of-year exams, since many had a gap in studying: “We need to hold their hands.” Teachers and students alike try to innovate ways to keep students engaged. Shukria says their teaching assistants created some social activities, such as book clubs, art groups and competitions between years and schools.
For Zolaikha, the digital realm helped ease her sense of purposelessness. She was particularly inspired by an online global youth exchange, in which she participated in 2021: “It was amazing to meet all these other young people. In Afghanistan we aren’t very exposed to other cultures and other ideas.” Still in her late teens, the experience gave her an idea of “helping all my former classmates to get access to other peers from around the world to learn and have conversations, see life from a different perspective.” Zolaikha launched a global mentoring initiative: “In Afghanistan, we have such a closed environment, it’s easy to think that everywhere people live the same way as you, but they don’t.”
She started with a small group of volunteers and a few international tutors, who were prepared to give an hour or two of their time to regular sessions with Afghan girls. After two years, she had 600 students, all in Afghanistan, and a big roster of volunteer tutors almost entirely outside Afghanistan. Teaching or mentoring is almost entirely done via one-to-one video calls, with a few specialist teachers offering small group classes. Zolaikha has received some support from universities and an NGO, particularly with the curriculum, but it is still mostly a volunteer operation. She is frank about her motivation for starting it:
Honestly, it was a way to help myself. I was feeling so dead. I wasn’t getting anywhere. I was attending classes online, but even if I could finish my university education online one day, I can’t work in Afghanistan. I am not allowed to do anything. So, helping other people, helping connect girls like me with people outside Afghanistan to teach and talk to these girls helped me as well as them.
An uncertain lifeline
Opportunities for online education look set to keep growing even as the prospects for circumventing the Emirate’s restrictions on girls’ education diminish. So far, this digital sphere has not been banned by the state. There was one notable interruption to internet access in September 2025, when Amir Hibatullah Akhundzada ordered a complete shutdown. In the end, it was overturned after a few days under pressure from businessmen and senior Talibs, but for already isolated female online students, it was a frightening time (UN Women). There have also been restrictions on the use of smartphones, though these have so far been limited to government officials (Guardian). In theory, however, since older girls and women do not need to leave home to study, it would seem hard for the state to justify interference on the grounds of safety or segregation. That said, the authorities have exercised growing control over what gets taught in schools and universities, not just where, including changing the state curriculum with a growing emphasis on Islamic subjects (UNICEF, p5).
With more and more students graduating every year from online or underground schools and with limited opportunities to study abroad, the development of online higher education and employment opportunities is a natural and much-needed extension. However, Zolaikha warns that there is no certainty that even online learning will survive: “You never know with the Taliban. They might wake up one morning angry and close some more things down.”
The students themselves tend not to dwell on how they learn. For them, it is the opportunity that matters. As student Ghazal says: “Despite all the difficulties, this school is giving us hope that we will not just become housewives.” Others are keenly aware of their less fortunate sisters. Several students interviewed, including Fariba, were painfully aware that their continuing education put them in a minority. Fariba captures the ambivalence:
There’s happiness because I was lucky and took my rights seriously and found a way to study every day. Sadness, too, because I may be learning, but there are so many more girls whose hopes and motivation to study came to an end.
Interviewees in the alternative education sector share a sense of urgency that each excluded girl matters. “Five years is a long time in the life of a child. A girl who was finishing grade six when the Taliban seized power in 2021 is now approaching adulthood,” said Mati Amin. “She can’t get those years back.”
Edited by Kate Clark and Jelena Bjelica
References
| ↑1 | This report generally refers to those studying grades 7-12 as ‘students,’ though in some education systems, such as the UK, ‘pupils’ is more commonly used for school-aged children. However, the connection between ages and grades is quite blurred in Afghanistan given the exclusion of girls and young women from secondary education, and ‘students’ was the term most commonly used in English by Afghan interviewees. Students can also refer to those in higher education, but this will be the focus of a separate AAN report. |
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| ↑2 | See Banned from Education – A Review of the Right to Education, UNESCO, 2025, pp33-45. |
| ↑3 | See UNICEF’s 2025 Afghanistan Education Situation Report (p23, p26), which also notes that there are significant changes underway regarding the curriculum for both state schools and madrasas (p10). A June 2026 report by the NGO Hamrah suggests that madrasas are reinforcing gender roles, including hostility towards female education. See Taliban Madrasas: Ideological Consolidation, Gender Persecution and Afghanistan’s Future Stability, pp19-22. |
| ↑4 | There have been reports of training centres being closed down in several provinces in 2025, including Kabul, Herat, Daikundi and Bamiyan, with several teachers arrested, according to the NGO Afghan Witness, citing multiple sources in the Afghan media. |
| ↑5 | See, for example, the Afghanistan strategy of the UN’s global fund, Education Cannot Wait, which is focused on expanding community-based education and accelerated learning programmes “for adolescent girls who are unable to access the formal education system.” Vocational training includes livelihood initiatives and efforts to train female primary school teachers or medical workers outside formal training colleges, which were closed to females in 2023 and 2024. However, all of these faced growing restrictions over 2025 and 2026, according to interviewees. See also Afghanistan Education Situation Report 2025, UNICEF/UNESCO 2025, pp10, 34 and 43. |
| ↑6 | See AAN’s translation of the 2024 vice and virtue law and analysis. See also UNAMA’s report on the enforcement of the vice and virtue law from April 2025 and Rawadari’s Afghanistan Human Rights Situation Report 2025, published in March 2026. |