An Ongoing Humanitarian Calamity

Where is one of worst places to be a woman? Afghanistan.

That’s what most people think when it comes to the topic of the women’s rights crisis under the ruling Taliban in Afghanistan. But this only tells part of the story.

Focusing on the word “rights” hides something more serious underneath: how people live and survive in this situation. What’s unfolding in Afghanistan is not just a women’s rights crisis, but a humanitarian disaster.

It affects how people access health care, education, food systems and basic supports and whether these system can function at all when half the population has been systematically removed from them. It forces families to deal with women’s limited access to work and services, often pushing households into deeper economic and social vulnerability.

The Taliban has steadily removed women from public spaces including work, health care and education. Recently, for example, female health-care workers were stopped at the gates of a United Nations office and banned from entering the facility by Taliban authorities.

These ongoing removals are incrementally creating a system that determines who has the right to exist, to provide assistance and to receive assistance.

What’s happening in Afghanistan is not simply gender discrimination; rather, it’s pushing an entire gender out of public systems altogether. The predicament of Afghan women is less a social problem and more a structural crisis that shapes institutions and everyday life.

Gender Apartheid

This is why the situation in Afghanistan is increasingly referred to as a form of gender apartheid rather than a women’s rights crisis. The exclusion of women reveals how institutions are built and will be maintained in the future.

Gender apartheid refers to a situation in which people are banned from certain spaces or activities based on their gender identity.

This discriminatory and violent practice in Afghanistan has been widely documented and heavily reported on, but the situation continues to deteriorate daily.

Its effects are also accumulative, with each restriction reinforcing others and deepening the overall crisis. These systemic rights violations would be increasingly difficult to reverse even if political bodies and the ruling government changed tomorrow.

That’s because removing women from professional spaces leads to schools losing teachers, hospitals losing trained staff and aid networks losing access to half the population. And this loss isn’t temporary; it limits how systems can respond to the growing needs around them.

When women get barred from institutions, the problem isn’t just that these organizations suffer in their service delivery and performance. It also results in the loss of institutional memory — the skills, professional knowledge and experience that is no longer transferred to future generations.

Over time, institutions also scale down or suspend certain services due to a shortage of female workers. As services shrink, significant gaps appear in the networks of care and support leaving entire groups of people without consistent access to support.

- Author: Sepita Hatami, The Conversation

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