Girls are banned from Afghan schools. Secret networks are teaching them anyway

Mohaddesa Hassani was piece of writing her 10th mark exams in capital of afghanistan a few years agone, when a teacher suddenly burst into the exam hall.

“He was terrified. He was like, 'Everybody just leave now. Leave your papers, leave your exam … hurry home,’” Hassani, who was 15 at the time, told The Current. 

It was August 2021, and the Taliban were retaking power in Afghanistan. 

Hassani spent months out of class, only returning when the new school year started the following spring. But at lunchtime, her principal announced that girls’ education above the sixth grade was now banned under Taliban law, and her first day of eleventh grade would also be her last.

“I was just in a nightmare. It didn't feel real,” she recalled.

Four years later, the restrictions remain in place, excluding millions of women and girls from higher education. But not everyone accepted those Taliban rulings. Hassani has been able to continue her education — and even graduate — thanks to a network of underground classrooms in Afghanistan, supported by Toronto-based organization Daricha School.

The organization was founded by Hazrat Wahriz, who is now based in Canada but was a university instructor and government official in Afghanistan when the Taliban retook power. He explained that daricha means window, and their work aims to create “a window to a better future, a window to a society … where there is the possibility of saying no, of asking why.”

Daricha supports 175 teachers and more than 6,000 students, tackling subjects like math, science and English-language lessons. The clandestine classes take place in teachers’ homes, with young girls often crouched over worksheets as they sit cross-legged on the floor. 

Those efforts are not without risk.

“There is a danger for their safety. They can be detained, they can be arrested, tortured," Wahriz said.

Despite that danger, Wahriz said no Daricha classroom has ever been raided by the Taliban since classes began in October 2021. He said that’s because the classrooms have the support and protection of their local communities, with parents often approaching Daricha about setting up classes in the first place.

The teachers are mostly women, he added, who see their work as a form of resistance to the Taliban edicts that ended their careers. Their pay is partially funded through donations from the Afghan diaspora.

Providing that education can be life-saving, Wahriz added, because for many young girls the only alternative is marriage — sometimes by force.

Those few years of denying education has had a monumental effect on Afghanistan and “a deadly impact for women and girls,” said Lauryn Oates, the executive director of Right to Learn Afghanistan (RtLA), a Canadian NGO that helps Afghan women and girls access education.

She pointed to rising child marriage rates, a worsening literacy gap, and narrowing employment prospects against the backdrop of rising poverty.

“It's also just really, really bad governance and development policy because the whole country is harmed, the entire Afghan economy is being dragged down by this,” she said.

Oates said RtLA frequently hears from women and girls who are experiencing mental health issues and “losing their hope and their sense of purpose in life,” but added that many have been “unbelievably resourceful in finding workarounds.”

Afghan woman deplores loss of girls' education

Oates’ organization has been tracking the number of organizations continuing to educate girls in Afghanistan, in addition to Daricha. Their most recent figures catalogued 201 education providers — each supporting an average of 948 students — but Oates thinks there may be many more operating in secret.

Almost two-thirds of these organizations are led by Afghans, she added.

“That shows the existence of this whole kind of parallel education system that is really spontaneous and self-organizing but is also strapped for resources,” she said.

In the months after the Taliban returned, Hassani watched her friends leave Afghanistan to start new lives and new schools in other countries.

Feeling stuck, she asked them to join her online and show her the new things they were learning As her friends abroad told their friends, a network began to form.

With Daricha’s support, Hassani and her peers co-founded an online tutoring network that now connects roughly 700 girls in Afghanistan with 480 tutors all over the world. 

“When you're in Afghanistan, you're cut out from the whole world,” Hassani said. For her, those online classes offered “that little connection” that encouraged her to keep going.

Daricha also gave Hassani guidance and advice about applying for post-secondary education abroad, including scholarships. The organization currently has 49 graduates studying all over the world.

Now 19, Hassani is studying psychology in California. She wants to continue helping others and empowering women to find brighter futures.

Oates would like to see international bodies doing more to support these educators.

“Help them become sustainable, help them connect with each other, and help them actually fill that gap that the current authorities in Afghanistan are refusing to fill,” she said.

She said it’s not just a moral or ethical question, but “an investment in human capital.”

“These are the very same people who will end up responsible for rebuilding their country and for bringing peace to their country down the road,” she said.

Wahriz hopes to return to Afghanistan one day, and believes the people there want progress. He thinks education can play a key role in creating that change, just as it did in his life.

“I saw how my teachers, from the very beginning … impacted my life. And I wanted to do the same thing, to change the lives of a new generation for better,” he said.

Journalist

Interview with Hazrat Wahriz produced by Niza Lyapa Nondo

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