ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The United Nations’ special envoy to Afghanistan, Roza Otunbayeva, emphasized on Sunday that tackling the challenge of ensuring education for Afghan girls and women requires multi-dimensional efforts and dialogue at all levels.
Speaking at the International Conference on Girls’ Education in Muslim Communities, Otunbayeva, who also heads the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), said, “The challenge of ensuring access to education for girls and women in Afghanistan is not one-dimensional and it requires dialogue at all levels.”
The two-day conference, hosted by Pakistan, brought together senior educational activists, officials, and human rights organizations with the goal of promoting women’s education across Muslim-majority nations.
Malala Yousafzai, Nobel laureate and global education activist, also addressed the conference, urging Muslim leaders to withhold legitimacy from the Taliban and condemn their draconian restrictions on women’s education.
“For the past three and a half years, the Taliban have stripped every Afghan girl of her right to education,” Malala said during the conference. “They have used our religion as a tool to justify these actions. The Taliban have made their objective clear: they seek to erase women and girls from all aspects of public life and remove them from society entirely.”
The Taliban’s policies have left Afghan women and girls facing some of the most severe restrictions in the world. Girls above the sixth grade have been banned from attending school, and universities have also been closed to female students.
