Women and girls in Afghanistan are being coerced into attending religious schools, with the Taliban increasingly linking food aid and employment to families' agreement to send their daughters to madrasas, according to a joint investigation by The Guardian and Zan Times.
Since returning to power in August 2021, the Taliban have excluded women and girls from secondary and higher education. In their place, they have built a network of over 21,000 Islamic religious schools, with nearly 50 new madrasas constructed or planned between September 2024 and February 2025 across 11 provinces.
Families who resist face isolation and hunger. One mother from Nimroz province, Karima, said she pulled her daughters out of school after a local mullah promised food aid if they attended his class, but nothing materialised. Another mother, Nasreen, was told: 'Send your daughters to our religious classes or you get nothing.'
The schools, run by mullahs in mosques or homes, offer a narrow curriculum focused on memorising the Qur'an, Taliban interpretations of Islamic law, and gender roles, with no mathematics or science. Textbooks are imported from Pakistan and printed in Pashto, even in Dari-speaking regions, leaving many children struggling to understand.
Experienced teachers with university degrees have been replaced by teenage former madrasa students with no formal training but strong ideological credentials. In Farah province, a headteacher said one replacement could not read fluently but had connections and a religious school certificate.
The impact is visible in remaining girls' primary schools, where class sizes have shrunk. In Nimroz, a teacher reported that 57 of her pupils left for madrasas this year. 'Before, each grade had four sections with 40 students. Now we have three sections with only 20 to 25,' she said.
