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Pakistan said on Saturday that the
Afghan Taliban government
did not attend a global summit on girls' education in the Muslim world organised in Islamabad.
"We had extended an invitation to Afghanistan but no-one from the Afghan government was at the conference," education minister Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui told news agency AFP.
"Nevertheless, representatives from various organisations dedicated to girls'
education in Afghanistan
will be participating in the event," he said.
The Taliban have deliberately deprived 1.4 million Afghan girls of schooling through bans, a UN agency said last year. Afghanistan is the only country in the world with bans on female secondary and higher education.
The Taliban, who took power in 2021, barred education for girls above sixth grade because they said it didn't comply with their interpretation of Sharia, or Islamic law. They didn't stop it for boys and show no sign of taking the steps needed to reopen classrooms and campuses for girls and women.
Unesco said at least 1.4 million girls have been deliberately denied access to secondary education since the takeover, an increase of 300,000 since its previous count in April 2023, with more girls reaching the age limit of 12 every year.
The UN agency warned that authorities have "almost wiped out" two decades of steady progress for education in Afghanistan. " The future of an entire generation is now in jeopardy," it added. It said Afghanistan had 5.7 million girls and boys in primary school in 2022, compared with 6.8 million in 2019.
The enrollment drop was the result of the Taliban decision to bar female teachers from teaching boys, Unesco said, but could also be explained by a lack of parental incentive to send their children to school in an increasingly tough economic environment.
Meanwhile, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Malala Yousafzai also attended the Pakistan-organised event. Malala was nearly killed by militants as a schoolgirl.
Yousafzai was evacuated from the country in 2012 after being shot by the Pakistan Taliban, who were enraged by her activism, and she has returned to the country only a handful of times since.
