Gender Alert on Covid-19 Afghanistan

UN Women, UNICEF and Human Rights Watch jointly issue this fifteenth alert to continue to highlight the gender specific impact of COVID-19 in Afghanistan. 

This alert focuses on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on women and girls’ education and the long-lasting consequences it will have on gender equality, women’s human rights and Afghanistan’s development and peace efforts. 

It highlights how the health crisis has further reduced already severely limited access to education for women and girls, and how this is likely to have profound and lasting effects with the potential to undermine progress on women’s rights and gender equality achieved over the last two decades.

This alert concludes with a set of recommendations for consideration by national and international stakeholders. UN Women, UNICEF, and Human Rights Watch are committed to advancing the rights of women and girls, including through the COVID-19 crisis. 

This alert serves to advance this aim by providing a basis for an informed discussion on the gender-specific impacts of COVID-19 on women and girls’ education. It highlights how critical it is, as part of COVID-19 response and recovery efforts, to prioritize and invest in ensuring girls’ continuous access to safe, inclusive and quality education and second chance education for women who were denied earlier access to a safe and quality education. 

Such commitments and investments are essential to ensure that progress made towards achieving gender equality in Afghanistan will be continued, and that Afghan women and girls will have equal access to education, as is their right under international human rights law including the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.