The Taliban’s decision to prohibit women from working could cost the Afghan economy up to $1 billion, or 5% of GDP, according to a new assessment released as the terrorist group begs international assistance to avert a worsening crisis.
The UN report provided a bleak image of Afghanistan’s economy, which is suffering from high inflation and a cash shortage. Women make up 20% of the workforce in the country, and barring women from working may save half a billion dollars in household spending, according to the report.
Over the weekend, Taliban acting Prime Minister Mullah Mohammad Hassan appealed to the international community for assistance in averting a new crisis, assuring that women’s rights would be maintained under Sharia law, which allows them to study and work. While Hassan isn’t the first politician from Afghanistan’s new government to ask assistance, his administration hasn’t provided specifics on how women will be supported.
After sweeping to power in August, the militant group ordered all female government employees to stay at home and forbade most girls from attending school, according to a UN assessment. Only a few women working in critical sectors such as nursing have been asked to return to work.
“I want to say very clearly that there isn’t a real full recovery of the Afghan economy without female participation,” Abdallah al Dardari, the head of UNDP, said in an interview. “Our initial results show that the contribution of educated women to the Afghan productivity is higher than that of men with the same level of education.”
Restricting women’s access to social life, including employment, adds to Afghanistan’s uncertainties as it deals with a sudden stop in international aid, which accounts for up to 40% of its GDP and 80% of its budget spending, according to the research. The country’s GDP will decrease by 20% in a year, and the decline might accelerate to 30% in the coming years, according to the report.
The United States and its Western allies have frozen almost $9 billion in Afghanistan reserves abroad due to concerns about the Taliban’s persistent links to terrorism, human rights violations, and failure to form an inclusive government. The Taliban have repeatedly demanded that these funds be freed, a demand that acting Prime Minister Hassan has echoed.
According to Al Dardari, Afghanistan will require $6 billion to $8 billion in annual international subsidies to provide basic services, encourage growth, and maintain peacekeeping missions. To prevent a humanitarian disaster, the government would need an estimated $2 billion only to raise the incomes of those who are facing extreme poverty, he added.
According to Adnan Mazarei, a senior scholar at the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics, “In many ways, the de facto authorities are shooting themselves in the foot, particularly with limitations on women and others.” The Taliban’s request for the world to release the assets and resume aid could help “in the very short term,” but the broader issue is to strengthen Afghanistan’s poor institutions.
Here’s some key facts and figures on women in Afghanistan:
- The economic impact of educating a girl in Afghanistan is more than double that for educating a boy, according to the UN report.
- The country was ranked 166 out of 167 countries on the UN’s gender development index in 2019.
- More a quarter of the 400,000 civil servants in Afghanistan are women. They have been banned from working until there are sharia-related procedures in place to ensure their safety.
- Millions of women voted in the last elections and 89 of the 352 members of parliament were female.
- Taliban unveiled a 53-member cabinet in September, which did not include any woman. In the previous government, there were 13 women ministers and deputy ministers.
