Afghanistan Gender Report HTML

Chapter 1
Introduction: In support of the government's efforts and policies, the World Bank has prepared this Country Gender Assessment to identify critical areas in which gender-responsive actions are likely to enhance growth, poverty reduction and human well-being. The extent of gender discrimination in Afghanistan is pervasive, and the present report focuses on a few key sectors deemed particularly important for both short and long-term reconstruction. Gender gaps in Afghanistan are widespread in health, in education, in economic opportunities and in power and political voice. While women and girls bear the direct cost of these inequalities, and the negative effects are felt throughout the society. The Country Gender Assessment makes the case that improvements in women's situation are essential for the reconstruction of the country - and that sizable investments in this regard will yield large benefits.

Chapter 3
Education: This chapter summarizes trends in key education indicators for Afghanistan, and also lays out the main constraints to education for girls in particular. While a significant leap in enrollment has taken place since the collapse of the Taliban rule, almost half of school age children are still not enrolled. Furthermore, there are huge regional disparities, as well as rural-urban disparities. A number of supply factors that affect children’s and, in particular, girls’ access to school are the lack of school facilities, in particular girls’ schools and girls’ secondary schools; lack of female teachers; and insecurity. Several socio-cultural and political factors are also identified as having a negative impact on girls’ enrollment and school retention, such as poverty, targeting of girls’ schools by opponents of the present government, and culturally determined notions of education as ‘unnecessary’ or ‘harmful’ for girls.

Chapter 5
Legal Rights and Voice: Despite Constitutional gender equality, Afghan women's lives are still influenced more by the notion of complementarities between male and female roles rather than equality. Afghan women are far from a homogenous group, and differences by ethnicity, region, socioeconomic status, education level and residence in urban/rural areas are significant. Overall women's lives center on the family and the household, which are seen as their main area of activity. Their rights and duties are assigned by both formal and informal systems, which ultimately define their place in the family and in the society. This chapter discusses the formation of gender relations in the household along with women's limited role in decision-making and control over household assets and planning of family affairs.

Chapter 7
Conclusion: This Country Gender Assessment has analyzed some important facets of Afghan society that have a bearing on women's status and gender relations. It provides a situational analysis of gender in Afghanistan and addresses it in the context of different sectors - health, education, women's work and political participation. The report concludes that in each of these areas while culture is extremely important, and there are factors unique to Afghanistan to be taken into account in designing policy and understanding the social structure, there are nevertheless also large similarities between Afghanistan and other countries in the region. While Afghanistan's overall health and certainly reproductive health indicators are extremely poor, as are education indicators, its indicators of women's labor force participation are quite similar to the rest of the region. Even in health indicators, Afghanistan perhaps faces the same problems in infant mortality as do certain poorest regions of India and Pakistan. Afghanistan's policy framework, its implementation structures and institutions and basic infrastructure have all been near-devastated by years of political turmoil, which seems to form the overwhelming cause for these poor indicators.