By Savithri Rodrigo
Pakistan (Commonwealth Union)_ A powerful proponent of equal access to education for girls for which she paid the price for by being fatally shot when she was just fifteen, 2014 Nobel Peace Laureate Malala Yousafzai has been speaking out for all Muslim countries to ensure that women and girls gain equal educational opportunities as their male counterparts. Very blunt about conditions in Afghanistan right now, she has been openly calling out the Taliban for the harsh and rigorous measures meted to women and girls, especially those who seek access to education.
When the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in August 2021, it banned education for girls, shutting down schools and heaping stringent penalties for those who encouraged education in any form for girls. However, those rules have been slightly relaxed with both male and female students returning to some public universities, although Islamist authorities have decreed that male and female students must be segregated, while the curriculum is compulsorily based on religious principles.
Although primary schools have remained open in Afghanistan since August 2021 for both male and female children, when it comes to secondary education for girls, all these schools have been shut down. To temper some of the backlash the Taliban received on this decision, there was an announcement that secondary schools will be opened last week. However, as expected, the Taliban made a U-turn on that decision with a flimsy excuse that a ruling had to be made on the uniforms to be worn by the girls.
Yousufzai, who was awarded the Nobel Prize when she was just 17 and the youngest to be conferred the honour, sums up the general milieu as the Taliban envisioning an Afghanistan that doesn’t have educated women. Growing up in Swat in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa where the Paksitani Taliban periodically banned girls from attending school, her outspokenness from her teenage days drew the wrath of Taliban gunmen who stormed the bus in which she was traveling to school and fatally shot Yousafzai in the head along with two of her fellow students.
Yousufzai, whose advocacy is now an international movement which has gained her the title of being Pakistan’s ‘most prominent citizen’, travelled to her home country this week from the UK where she now resides, to comfort the over 33 million people affected by debilitating floods across the country. Devastated by the images of the storm ravaged country with more than three million children having their education disrupted and thousands of schools damaged, she called on world leaders to, “step up, accelerate your response plans and mobilise funds needed to help Pakistan rebuild and support impacted populations.” The Malala Fund has committed USD 700,000 towards floor relief in Pakistan.
