International Women’s Day

Baroness D'Souza Excerpts

Friday 6th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness D’Souza (CB)]

My Lords, I begin by acknowledging this Government’s and the previous Government’s significant commitment to women and girls around the world and, in particular, to their education. That said, programmes to prevent violence against women and to promote women’s rights and freedoms remain in a sorry state and are likely to deteriorate further with the new ODA funding cuts. This arises due to the continuing and shocking attacks on women, together with a global reduction in overseas aid for programmes of prevention.

Gender equality remains elusive. Women’s rights are the hardest fought and the first to go, and nowhere is that truer than in Afghanistan. I return again and again—without any apology—to the plight of women and girls in Afghanistan, because it is the only country in the world that strictly forbids secondary and tertiary education for girls and excludes women from the workforce. It is firmly established that the education of girls and women is a magic bullet of development. Development on many fronts inevitably follows a focus on educating girls, and that has been proven the world over. However, the current statistics for Afghanistan are dismal: about 2.2 million girls are banned from secondary school and 93% of all children fail to achieve basic reading proficiency by the end of primary school. Recent research shows that those schools that have a higher proportion of teachers with a university education fare significantly better on good student outcomes, especially in language learning.

Afghanistan still has one of the largest workforce gender gaps in the world: only 24% of women participate in the labour force compared with 89% of men. Almost 80% of young Afghan women are not in education, employment or training. The longer-term impact of this cruel deprivation is that a dearth of trained women in midwifery and healthcare means that there will be no female practitioners as surgeons, midwives, nurses and primary health carers for the foreseeable future, thereby affecting all Afghan women, who cannot accept healthcare delivered by males.

Women are not only excluded but punished for any transgressions of the Taliban codes. In addition, many girls now face the choice of an unwelcome early marriage, developing mental health issues caused by confinement within the family home, or, in some tragic instances, suicide. The financial divide is equally stark, with women precluded from having a bank account or access to mobile money services. There are no women in the de facto Cabinet or in local offices.

It is difficult to assess conditions for women and girls in Afghanistan as a whole. The degree to which the Taliban codes are implemented varies from one region to another. Many modest initiatives are run by NGO partners of the major multilateral and bilateral donors and by the private sector, but these programmes are vulnerable and often subject to the whims of local Taliban commanders or carried out under clandestine conditions. We know that many thousands of Afghan families are being repatriated from Pakistan, many of which are female-headed groups lacking any resources at all. We know that climate change has caused severe drought for the past six years, as well as severe flooding, leading to other disasters such as landslides—and now Afghanistan faces war with Pakistan.

It is clear that Afghanistan suffers from chronic economic, political, climate, environmental—it is the second most mined country in the world—food and gender stresses. It is estimated that 36% of the population—17.7 million—face crisis levels of food insecurity. The country’s isolation means, among many other issues, a lack of accurate and timely information about who is in most need, where they are and what channels remain open to provide assistance.

The future looks bleak. Immediately, however, the plea is that the Government continue and even increase their investment in girls’ education, no matter the scarcity of funding. Given the uncertainty of Taliban interference, a focus on improving—in some cases radically—the teaching in primary schools will pay dividends. There is good evidence to show that younger children are key in educating other family members, including their parents. There is too, in some regions of Afghanistan, a growth in so-called secret as well as online secondary and even tertiary education, and these initiatives deserve investment. Above all, we have to keep in mind that education is the one sure way a country and its citizens can achieve a future for themselves. We can and must do this.