“The silver lining is the strength of Afghan women and girls”

Amid everything happening in her country, Noor* remains hopeful that one day the tide will turn and Afghan women and girls will enjoy their freedoms and rights. Living in Kabul, she works for Organisation W*, a women’s rights organisation committed to empowering Afghan women in all their diversity, advancing equality and justice in Afghanistan and globally. 

Secured livelihoods have been a key approach in the organisation’s capacity-building programmes, which provide literacy training for women, cash-and-food-based interventions, and emergency aid during events such as earthquakes and floods across several provinces in the country. 

Leveraging their convening power across the country, Organisation W has established a network of women across different provinces. Before the fall of the government, this network tackled cases of gender-based violence; now it works secretly and voluntarily, due to heightened surveillance. 

“This network meets monthly and is split between men and women tackling various community issues. We have newer initiatives comprised of women above 60 — mothers-in-law and grandmothers — who identify harmful norms, including early child marriage and domestic violence, and discuss how to tackle them,” she says.

“Grandmothers are the decision-makers in Afghan households, even in a male-dominated society, as men frequently defer to their mothers on decision-making,” she adds.

Organisation W has also trained diversity ambassadors who use digital media to spread messages of peace, diversity and culture through a project called “Afghan Diversity Ambassadors,” editing, translating and publishing content in the local languages: Farsi, Pashto and Dari. 

Five years on since the Taliban takeover

Contrasting the situation with five years ago, Noor describes an enormous shift, with new restrictions and edicts further marginalising women from public life altogether. “Women were in government, medical schools, universities and businesses. Now, the only thing a woman can openly do is go to restaurants, in family sections only, or go shopping. Women cannot attend university or work most jobs. Female teachers are only permitted for grades 1–3; grades 4–12 are taught by men,” she says. 

In healthcare, there have been no female medical graduates since 2021. This is a worrying trend, as the current pool of female doctors and nurses will keep shrinking as their older counterparts retire. Afghanistan is a conservative society where many men do not allow their wives to be treated by male doctors, and roughly 95% of families want a female doctor present for childbirth — leading to unqualified staff filling the gaps and compromising the quality of care. “My cousin recently visited a hospital, and an inadequately trained nurse could not properly administer an IV drip,” she adds. 

Accessing government institutions has also become challenging: women cannot enter government ministries at all, even for routine matters like collecting educational documents — a male family member (father, brother or husband) must go instead. Delays have become common, Noor reports, deliberately discouraging women from pursuing education. 

Women’s bodily autonomy has been weaponised through dress-code restrictions and new hijab standards that vary by province and are imposed without warning. Hijabs are more socially accepted in provinces that are more open and have closer cultural ties to Iran. Four weeks ago, in the Afghan city of Herat, a woman was killed for wearing the ‘wrong’ hijab under new rules requiring women to wear full black covering. 

“Many women are now afraid to leave their houses, for fear of wrongful detention and the reputational damage that it carries for a woman in Afghan society,” Noor says.

Public life is also severely restricted: women are barred from gyms, saunas, swimming pools, amusement parks and public parks — spaces now used exclusively by men and boys. The only recreational access some women have is on private, family-owned land outside the cities. Beauty parlours have been banned; those still operating do so secretly out of homes, without advertising an address, since a property owner found to be housing one risks losing tenants or facing punishment. 

Freedom of movement is also severely restricted, with women required to be accompanied by a male guardian. This worsens the situation for women facing domestic abuse, who are forced to remain with their abusers. 

“Afghanistan has become a country where we’ve been reduced to surviving, not living,” says Noor.

Standing unrelentless in feminist advocacy

Noor remains committed to advocacy work that advances women’s economic rights through livelihood training, which has meaningfully supported women who are out of work, living with disabilities, widowed, or unable to support their families. Through skills training such as tailoring, Organisation W has focused on building literacy and numeracy alongside entrepreneurship and marketing training for women in businesses such as confectionery and weaving. 

“One woman told us that before the training she felt useless, as she couldn’t read or write. After the training, she could undertake everyday tasks such as identifying and finding documents through reading. She had endured years of being berated by her husband, and the training left her feeling empowered for the first time,” says Noor.

A call to action to the international community

As funding for women’s rights continues to dip — worsened further by the closure of USAID and the pullback of bilateral donors — Noor says Organisation W previously ran up to 10 projects at a time, providing crucial services to Afghan women and girls. “Today, we only have two active projects and have cut back substantially on office resources, making hard compromises — such as prioritising keeping our female staff employed, given how precarious their situation would be if they lost their jobs, compared to our male colleagues,” she says. 

She urges donors, allies and the global community to demonstrate commitment to gender equality in Afghanistan by providing long-term, flexible funding to women’s rights organisations — funding that is crucial to their survival and to creating spaces where Afghan women and girls can be heard. “Programmes that provide psychosocial support and livelihoods training have become short-term due to unsustainable funding, at exactly the time we need to support women and girls most. We need long-term funding that delivers urgent humanitarian assistance,” she says. 

For Noor, genuine international solidarity means support that is agile enough to adapt to Afghanistan’s shifting geopolitical context — through flexible, long-term funding that centres local decision-making and gives women’s rights organisations the agency and autonomy to determine how funds are used. This includes easing burdensome reporting requirements that currently sideline local expertise. 

“The international community needs to officially not recognise the Taliban — the more they do, the more power it gives them,” she says.

Afghan women’s voices need to be heard in international forums, so they can participate in discussions that affect their future. “Organisation W has been hosting such convenings internationally, bringing together feminists,” she says. While she notes that many international forums have been organised to amplify the voices of Afghan women, she feels very little impact has resulted from them. “We also need to feature more women with lived experience in Afghanistan, striking a balance with the diaspora, so that representation is broad and inclusive,” she adds.  

Noor’s message to Afghan women and girls is to stay hopeful.

“Women are organising, attending classes, working online, running small businesses — doing it secretly for now, but one day we will do it openly. We stand proud, and we stay consistent and bold,” she says.

*Real names witheld to protect identity