Engineering student Soumaya Faruqi had to flee to Afghanistan to continue her studies after the return of the Taliban Government two years ago, which banned the more than 1.1 billion women and girls from gaining education, and access to schools and universities.
The 21-year-old, now living in the US, is the face of a campaign launched on August 15, 2023, by the UN Education Cannot Wait for global funds to tom combat the crisis marking the two-year anniversary of the fall of the legitimate democratic government on August 15, 2021.
Under the motto #Afghan Girls Voices, the operation is spearheading a global call to respect Afghan girls and women’s right to education. Countless girls and women had already left the country to continue their education.
Faruqi, for example, finished high school in Qatar after she and nine girls from her robotics team, “The Afghan Dreamers, left Afghanistan in 2021. Now she is beginning her second year of engineering studies at the Sacramento State University in California, thanks to a scholarship from Qatar.
FORGOTTEN
“The main aim of the campaign is to bring the attention of the world again to the girls in Afghanistan and their education issues,” Faruqi told the Agence France Presse through a telephone. “Afghanistan seems to be forgotten,” she added.
The near total exclusion of women from Afghan Public Life, including in education and employment, has become one of the world’s most sticking points preventing the international world community from offering aid and recognition to the Taliban Government.
“The path to any more formal relationship between Taliban and other countries will be blocked unless and until the rights of the women and girls are actually supported,” the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters in Washington.
Conditions for women and girls in Afghanistan are the “worst globally,” a UN Report found last month, saying that the Taliban government policies based on the strict interpretation of Islam could amount to greater apartheid.”
In fact, the state of human rights in Afghanistan should be considered a crime against humanity, and it should be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court, the UN special envoy of global education, former prime minister of Britain, Gordon Brown, told reporters during a video meeting on August 15, 2023.
TRAGIC
In 2021, barely a month after returning to power for the first time in twenty years, the Taliban authorities banned girls from attending senior secondary school before closing the university doors to them in December 2022 and heavily restricting their workforce participation.
For Faruqi, these circumstances do not stand “We have to make sure that girls and women have access to equal opportunities, and they have access to education because education is the key to freedom, she told AFP.
“Girls have been barred from entering public spaces such as schools, parks, and gyms. There is nothing allowed them to do, just stay at home,” she stated on August 15, 2023. For many families, the only path forward for their daughters is marriage regardless of their consent,” she told the AFP, adding that many of her classmates have been forced to marry.
Depression is widespread. The number and rate of suicides have gone up a lot in the last two years. It is tragic, she said in a statement.
The Education Cannot Wait Campaign will aim to raise global awareness of the issues via social media into the next month, amplifying the voice of Afghan girls and women just as world leaders gather for the UN Assembly on September 18 and 19 this year.
