UNITED NATIONS

ASSISTANCE MISSION IN
AFGHANISTAN
UN REPORT URGES AFGHANISTAN TO
RECRUIT FEMALE TEACHERS LOCALLY TO
BOOST GIRLS’ EDUCATION
KABUL - A United Nations report released today
said that female teachers are “urgently needed” to
boost the education of girls in Afghanistan, which
has the highest level of gender disparity in the world.
“In Afghanistan, female teachers are vital for girls to
be able to enroll in school, but women face cultural
barriers in seeking work in areas where they are not
chaperoned by family members,” according to
the ‘Education for All Global Monitoring
Report,’ released globally by the UN Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
UNESCO’s 11th flagship report also said that South
and West Asia is home to four of the countries with
the “highest gender disparities globally.”
With 71 girls in school for every 100 boys,
Afghanistan is one of the countries with very high
disparities at the expense of girls, the report noted.
Other countries in the region with similar challenges
are Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal.
“Local recruitment has its benefits, such as teachers’
greater acceptance of a rural posting and reduced
attrition, but some of the most disadvantaged
communities lack competent applicants where
access to primary schooling is low, as is the case in
Afghanistan,” the report said.
Although the UNESCO report said that female
teachers should be recruited locally to encourage
girls’ school enrolment, the lack of girls’ education
until recent times meant very few women are
qualified to become teachers.
Violence and intimidation were used to prevent girls
and women from attending school during the Taliban
rule of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. No Afghan
girl was in secondary school in 1999. But, in the
wake of the fall of the Taliban regime, international
assistance started to pour in to improve various
social sectors including education and health.
By 2011, the female gross enrolment ratio rose to 34
per cent, increasing the gender parity index (GPI) to
0.55, said the UNESCO report.
To achieve gender parity, a country's GPI should be
between 0.97 and 1.03. A GPI below 0.97 indicates
a disparity in favour of males. A GPI above 1.03
indicates a disparity in favour of females.
After the Taliban’s fall in 2001, the UN Children’s
Fund (UNICEF) became the leading partner of the
Government of Afghanistan in the reconstruction of
the education sector, a relationship that continues
today, the UN agency notes on its website.
UNICEF notes that remarkable progress has been
made in education in Afghanistan in terms of
students’ enrolment since 2001. Students’ enrolment
has increased tremendously for both boys and girls
from just 900,000 in 2001 to around 8.3 million in
2011 of which 39 per cent are females.
UNESCO’s last ‘Education for All Global Monitoring
Report,’ released in October 2012, stated that
despite Afghanistan’s place at the bottom of the
rankings, Afghanistan had overcome “the biggest
obstacles to girls’ education any country has
witnessed.”
The UN agency’s latest report has urged countries
to allocate at least 20 per cent of their national
budget to education.
“Yet the global average in 2011 was only 15 per
cent, a proportion that has hardly changed since
1999. Of the 138 countries with data, only 25 spent
more than 20 per cent in 2011, while at least six low
and middle income countries decreased their
education expenditure as a share of total
government expenditure by five percentage points or
more between 1999 and 2011. This situation is not
expected to improve in coming years,” said the
report.

However, it added, some countries, including

Afghanistan, are resisting this negative trend and
are expected to increase their education budgets.
Afghanistan aims to increase the number of female
teachers by 50 per cent by the end of this year
under an interim education plan that includes
monetary and housing incentives for female
teachers, as well as special teacher training
programmes for women in remote areas and women
who do not meet current qualification requirements.
This year’s UNESCO report reveals that a global
learning crisis is costing governments $129 billion a
year.
“Ten per cent of global spending on primary
education is being lost on poor quality education that
is failing to ensure that children learn. This situation
leaves one in four young people in poor countries
unable to read a single sentence, affecting one third
of young women in South and West Asia,” it said.
The Report concludes that “good teachers are the
key to improvement” and calls on governments to
provide the best in the profession to those who need
them most.
Related article:
- Afghanistan registers ‘major progress’ in girls’
education: UN report