'Girls are in darkness, I want them to be enlightened through education.'
Education and Rights Awareness student, Kabul, 2007.
WOMANKIND Worldwide supports women in Afghanistan with education and rights training - and psycho-social support.
Six years after the fall of the Taliban, the international community's rhetoric of improving women's status is not reflected in the real lives of ordinary Afghan women. In some areas, such as violence against women, things have got a lot worse.
WOMANKIND needs support from MPs to ensure that gender equality and women's rights are at the heart of government aid to Afghanistan.
You can help us achieve this by following these two simple steps:
- Write to your MP (using the text below)
- Tell us their response
<copy the text below>
As your constituent I am writing to ask for your support in urging the government to prioritise gender equality and women's human rights as part of its aid assistance to Afghanistan.
As you may be aware, whilst there have been legal, civil and constitutional gains for women in Afghanistan since 2001, there remain a great number of serious challenges to women's safety and protection, realisation of their civil and political rights and social and economic status that need to be urgently addressed.
Violence against women - including physical, sexual and psychological violence - is pervasive at all levels of society in Afghanistan and affects an overwhelming majority of women and girls. Some forms of violence such as honour killings have risen steadily, while security for women living in many provinces is worse now than in 2001.
Women continue to be excluded from politics and decision-making; a combination of customary law and lack of access to formal justice systems continues to place serious and substantial restrictions on women's human and civil rights, their ability to move freely in society and to play their part in decision-making within their families, their communities and their country.
And the practical needs of women and girls - access to health care, education and livelihoods - remain unmet. Furthermore, the women's organisations that are working to address these issues receive no funding from the Afghan government and are entirely reliant on the support of international non-governmental organisations.
As the UK's Department for International Development has acknowledged, most recently in its 2006 White Paper and the 2007 Gender Equality Action Plan, gender equality and women's human rights are essential pre-conditions for eliminating world poverty. Yet, despite the dire needs of women in Afghanistan, DFID has failed to prioritise gender equality and women's rights as a strategic goal in the country.
Specifically, I would like you to urge DFID and the UK government to:
- Make gender equality and women's human rights an explicit goal of DFID's policy in Afghanistan - DFID should also set clear targets and indicators to measure progress on gender equality and women's rights in all areas of its work
- Promote efforts to end violence against women - DFID should actively promote efforts to make tackling VAW in all its forms an integral part of its economic- and social- development programmes in Afghanistan. It should also promote personal, household and community analysis of such issues and acknowledge the role VAW and gender inequality play in perpetuating violence at all levels of society and in exacerbating poverty
- Strengthen accountability of the Afghan national government by supporting Afghan civil society and, in particular, Afghan women's organisations - DFID should acknowledge the key role played by Afghan women's-rights organisations in holding their government to account - and in pushing through necessary reforms - and provide increased funding for their work to promote gender equality and women's human rights.
Yours sincerely
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