How the Taliban’s ban on women aid workers could deepen Afghanistan’s crisis
Another edict that removes women from public life and makes it harder for the country’s most vulnerable to get help.
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This article was originally published by Vox. An excerpt has been reposted below.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said about 500 women work for 19 of their NGO partners in Afghanistan; other international aid agencies also have hundreds of female employees across Afghanistan, most of them helping to serve tens of thousands of women and kids. In some cases, those employees, like Saara, rely on paychecks to support their families.
“This is the income that they depend on,” said Shameran Abed, executive director for BRAC International, an organization that suspended operations in Afghanistan but typically employs about 1,290 out of a staff of about 1,950, many of them local Afghan teachers.
“If this gets taken away, they’re saying, ‘How are we going to survive? This is like the rug being pulled away from underneath our feet.’ It’s so distressing for our female colleagues — and that’s before we even get to our program participants who are even more vulnerable and even more in need of the support that our colleagues provide.”
“The situation — it’s just grim,” he added.
Read the rest of the article here.
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