Women still arrive in blue burqas at a hospital in Kabul, which is the only maternity facility of its kind in the nation, and wait for hours outside its gates. Now, some people cover their faces in silence, almost as a tiny act of defiance. Some people don’t. Because the women who used to staff the wards are gradually leaving the workforce and no new ones are coming to take their place, female doctors and nurses move between wards that are getting thinner every year.
This is the gradual phase of a crisis that appears abrupt on paper. If the Taliban’s restrictions on women’s employment and girls’ education continue, Afghanistan may lose over 25,000 female teachers and health workers by 2030, according to a new UNICEF report published in late April. Twenty thousand educators. Fifty-four hundred medical professionals. For a story this disorganized, the numbers seem almost too tidy.
The data already reflects the decline. The number of female basic education teachers decreased by more than nine percent in just two years, from approximately 73,000 in 2022 to about 66,000 in 2024. Between 2023 and 2025, the percentage of women in the civil service decreased from 21% to 17.7%. These are not forecasts. In a nation where about 3.8 million girls between the ages of seven and eighteen are already not in school, this is taking place right now, in real time.
It’s difficult to ignore its cruel symmetry. After the age of twelve, girls are not allowed to continue their education. The majority of public jobs are not open to women. Teachers age out, nurses retire, midwives depart, and the girls who could eventually replace them sit at home, learning as much as they can from their mothers and sisters, while they wait for a system that doesn’t seem to be changing. The executive director of UNICEF, Catherine Russell, described it as a nation losing both its current workforce and the generation that was supposed to take it over.
This becomes more immediately hazardous in the healthcare industry. A lack of female healthcare professionals is not a problem because social norms in many parts of Afghanistan prohibit women from receiving medical care from male physicians. It is a barrier separating newborns from basic medical care and mothers from maternal care. Stunting rates among children under five are expected to rise. This type of statistic may seem abstract at first, but it actually describes the long-term structure of a child’s body and brain.
According to UNICEF, the annual economic cost is approximately $84 million, or 0.5 percent of GDP. That figure will increase. In these circumstances, it always compounds silently until someone tries to add it up ten years later and discovers the figure is too big to fit on a page. Since 2023, Afghanistan’s economy has made some progress, but it is still in the early stages of recovery, and a nation that employs half of its people is not creating anything long-term.
Sitting in editorial offices far from Kabul, there is a propensity to treat all of this as background noise, just another grim bulletin from a place that the world has long since stopped paying attention to. However, the details continue to come to light. A school constructed or renovated. 442,000 children—the majority of whom are girls—are served by this community-based learning program in classrooms that are not part of the official system. There are pockets of obstinacy in a nation that is being asked to forget its past.
It’s unclear what will happen next. International pressure has eased into something more akin to exhaustion, and the Taliban have demonstrated no genuine desire to change direction. Reports are continuously released by aid organizations. Donor governments continue to release statements. And somewhere in Kabul, a girl who was supposed to start seventh grade this autumn is doing something else instead, and the nation is footing an uncountable bill.
