Home ›› 31 Oct 2021 ›› Biztech
Cooped up at home in Herat, Afghanistan, Zainab Muhammadi reminisces about hanging out with her friends in the cafeteria after coding class. Now she logs on every day to secret online lessons.
Her school shut down after the Taliban took control of the country in August. But that did not stop Muhammadi from learning.
“There are threats and dangers to girls like me. If the Taliban get to know ... they might punish me severely. They might even stone me to death,” said Muhammadi, who requested to use a pseudonym to protect her identity.
“But I have not lost hope or my aspirations. I’m determined to continue studying,” the 25-year-old told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on a video call.
She is one of an estimated hundreds of Afghan girls and women who are continuing to learn - some online and others in hidden makeshift classrooms - despite the Taliban’s closure of their schools.
Fereshteh Forough, the CEO and founder of Code to Inspire (CTI) - Afghanistan’s first all-female coding academy - created encrypted virtual classrooms, uploaded course content online, and gave laptops and internet packages to about 100 of her students, including Muhammadi.
“You can be locked at home (and) explore the virtual world without any hesitation, without worrying about geographical boundaries. That’s the beauty of technology,” she said.
In September, the government said older boys could resume school, along with all primary-age children, but told older girls roughly aged 12 to 18 to stay home until conditions permitted their return.
The Taliban, who barred girls from education during their last rule about 20 years ago, has promised it will allow them to go to school as it seeks to show the world it has changed.
A senior U.N. official who met the Taliban earlier this month said the government was working on a framework, which would be published by the end of the year.
“The education gains of the past two decades must be strengthened, not rolled back,” said Omar Abdi, deputy executive director of the UN’s children’s agency UNICEF.
After the Taliban were ousted in 2001, school attendance rose rapidly, with more than 3.6 million girls enrolled by 2018, according to UNICEF.
The number going to university, now in the tens of thousands, also jumped. Nearly 6% of women were accessing tertiary education in 2020, up from 1.8 per cent in 2011.
Nonetheless, the country has one of the world’s biggest education gender gaps, with UNICEF saying girls account for 60 pert cent of the 3.7 million Afghan children out of school.
Failing to let girls finish their education bears a huge cost, including poverty, child marriage, early childbearing, and a lack of understanding of their rights and ability to access basic services, campaigners say.
“Education allows them to take care of their health, have a stronger voice in their family, prevent domestic violence and become breadwinners,” said Forough, whose school teaches everything from English to graphic design and mobile application development.
“We didn’t want to wait. We wanted to continue our mission.”
Digital experts fear that the cash-strapped Taliban will not be able to maintain energy supplies, communication networks and tech infrastructure.
Not only could satellite companies and fibre providers from neighbouring countries such as Iran snap services, but the Taliban may start snooping on and censoring communications, said Mustafa Soltany, a Kabul-based IT consultant.
“The Taliban are very likely to put in place strict restrictions, monitoring and even spying in the digital arena where they can hunt dissidents, critics,” said Soltany, who has seen Taliban soldiers snatching and searching people’s mobile phones at checkpoints.
