Afghanistan is facing one of the world’s most severe education and learning crises, with 93% of children unable to read and understand a simple age-appropriate text by the end of primary school, according to a joint report by UNESCO and UNICEF.
The Afghanistan Education Situation Report 2025 says two decades of gains in school access have been sharply reversed since 2021 by restrictive policies, chronic underinvestment, sanctions-related funding constraints and overlapping humanitarian shocks, leaving millions of children – particularly girls – excluded from education and eroding learning outcomes across all levels.
Primary school enrolment reached about 6.77 million pupils in 2024, but growth stalled compared with 2023, the report said. Boys accounted for about 3.78 million pupils and girls for 2.98 million, with participation increasingly affected by poverty, household labour demands and declining school quality.
While gender parity in primary education has improved on paper, the report said those gains disappear beyond Grade 6. Female participation in secondary education dropped to zero in 2022 and has remained there through 2024 under policies imposed by Afghanistan’s de facto authorities.
The report estimates around 2.2 million adolescent girls have been excluded from secondary schooling to date, with a further 397,000 prevented from continuing education each academic year. More than 2.13 million primary-aged children remain out of school, about 60% of them girls.
Total secondary enrolment has also weakened. Verified data show enrolment fell to about 1.01 million students in 2024 from a peak of 1.42 million in 2021, reflecting both the complete exclusion of girls and declining participation among boys.
At university level, the gender gap has widened sharply. In 2024, enrolment stood at 188,957 men and just 1,244 women. New university entrants in 2023 included more than 43,000 men and no women, the report said. Female lecturers have also been disproportionately affected, with their numbers falling by about 70% since 2019.
Learning outcomes across the system remain among the worst globally. More than 90% of Afghan children aged 10 cannot read a simple text, placing the country far below South Asia’s regional average and signalling what the report describes as “schooling without learning”.
Shortages of trained teachers – particularly women – weak assessment systems and a lack of teaching materials have compounded the crisis, it said. Nearly half of schools lack safe buildings, about 79% have no electricity, and many do not have clean water, sanitation or boundary walls, discouraging attendance, especially for girls. More than 1,000 schools remain closed due to conflict, damage or natural disasters.
Early childhood education remains severely underdeveloped, with less than 1% of children aged three to five enrolled nationwide. Only 29% of children in that age group are considered developmentally on track, according to survey data cited in the report.
Regional disparities persist. In southern provinces, only about one in four children attends primary school, while in Uruzgan just 3.8% of children complete secondary education, compared with a national average of 31.3%.
The education system is also under growing strain from humanitarian pressures. Nearly 22.9 million people in Afghanistan require humanitarian assistance, with flooding, harsh winters, poverty and displacement disrupting schooling and forcing families to deprioritise education, the report said.
Large-scale returns from Pakistan and Iran have added further pressure. Since 2023, more than 2.7 million people have returned, many of them children with little or no prior access to formal education, overwhelming already fragile school infrastructure.
Sanctions and declining international aid have sharply reduced on-budget support, limiting the authorities’ ability to pay teachers, maintain schools and invest in infrastructure. More than 90% of the education budget is now absorbed by salaries, leaving little funding for facilities, materials or quality improvements, the report said.
Curriculum changes planned for 2025 are also reshaping the sector. Official directives would increase instructional time for religious subjects and reduce time for languages and social sciences, while hundreds of university books and subjects – including political science and gender studies – have been removed, raising concerns about academic relevance.
Opportunities for skills development remain extremely limited. About 42% of adolescents are not in education, employment or training, with girls accounting for more than two-thirds of those affected. Formal vocational training remains largely inaccessible to secondary-aged girls, while non-formal programmes remain small relative to need.
UNESCO and UNICEF called for renewed investment in foundational literacy and numeracy, teacher development, early childhood education and school infrastructure, and for restoring pathways for girls’ secondary and higher education.
Without urgent and sustained action, the agencies warned, Afghanistan risks entrenching long-term cycles of exclusion, poverty and gender inequality with lasting consequences for economic recovery and social stability.
