KABUL, AFGHANISTAN – Taliban restrictions on women’s movement, education, work, and participation in humanitarian aid are a central driver of Afghanistan’s worsening humanitarian crisis for women and girls, a new UN-backed gender analysis has found.
The report, titled 2025 Gender Analysis of Humanitarian Sectors in Afghanistan, released on Thursday, says Afghan women and girls are facing the combined impact of poverty, hunger, climate shocks, mass returns from neighboring countries, and cuts in humanitarian funding. However, Taliban policies have intensified these pressures by limiting women’s ability to work, study, move freely, access services, receive information, and influence aid delivery.
Since returning to power in August 2021, the Taliban have gradually built a system of restrictions that has pushed women and girls out of public life. Girls above the sixth grade remain barred from school, a ban that has kept millions of adolescent girls out of secondary education and deepened Afghanistan’s humanitarian and economic crises. Women were later banned from universities, while the Taliban also suspended medical education for women and girls, further threatening the future supply of female health workers.
The restrictions have also reached the humanitarian sector. In December 2022, the Taliban ordered national and international NGOs to stop women from working, accusing female staff of violating the group’s dress rules. The ban severely weakened aid operations in a country where many women and girls cannot safely or socially interact with male aid workers.
The report says these restrictions have directly damaged humanitarian access. In many parts of the country, women and girls cannot safely reach aid distribution sites, health services, protection support, or complaint mechanisms without female staff. At the same time, Taliban restrictions on female aid workers have reduced the very workforce needed to reach them.
Women-headed households are among the worst affected. According to the report, they experience higher food insecurity, lower incomes, weaker access to health and nutrition services, and greater reliance on harmful coping strategies such as child labour, school withdrawal, and early marriage of daughters.
The report warns that restrictions on women’s medical education and employment threaten the future supply of female health workers, making it harder for women and girls to access care in a country where social rules already prevent many from being treated by male doctors
