Five Years of Resilience We Should Never Have Asked For

Five years ago, on August 15, 2021, the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan.

In the months that followed, decades of progress for Afghan women and girls began to unravel. Girls were pushed out of secondary schools. Women were barred from universities. Their ability to work, travel, participate in public life, and shape their own futures became increasingly restricted.

Five years later, these restrictions are shaping an entire generation.

As an Afghan woman and Executive Director of Sahar Education, I have spent these years thinking about what it means to protect education when the systems that once made it possible have been dismantled.

Education did not disappear. It changed shape.

When formal classrooms closed, learning moved into homes, community spaces, online classrooms, and programs designed to operate within an increasingly restrictive environment.

In the past five years, Sahar has reached:

• 510 girls through Underground Tech Sheroes, providing IT, coding, empowerment, and health education.

• 390 women through Threads of Hope, combining literacy with tailoring, empowerment and health and vocational skills.

• 360 high-school-aged boys through Men as Partners in Change, engaging them in gender equity and healthy relationships.

• 850 students through Secret Scholars Online, helping girls and young women continue learning outside formal classrooms.

• 580 students through other Sahar programs

These programs look different from the schools Sahar once helped build, but their purpose remains the same: keeping education and opportunity within reach.

We should not romanticize resilience.

We often speak about the resilience of Afghan women. I see it every day in students who keep learning, teachers who keep teaching, and families who continue supporting their daughters.

But resilience should never make us comfortable with the circumstances that require it.

A girl secretly attending a technology class should inspire us, but it should also trouble us.

Afghan women should not have to be endlessly resilient simply to access rights others take for granted.

We cannot allow this to become normal.

A girl who was 12 when the Taliban returned is now 17. She has spent nearly her entire adolescence without formal secondary education.

A young woman who graduated from high school in 2021 could have completed her bachelor's degree by now.

Five years can hold an education, a career, independence, and choices about one's own future. Those years cannot simply be returned.

As international attention shifts elsewhere, the danger is that the exclusion of Afghan women and girls begins to feel ordinary.

It is not normal. We cannot speak about it as though it is.

What five years have taught us

We have learned that education must be flexible, locally informed, and connected to economic opportunity.

We have learned that digital literacy can be a lifeline, and that progress does not always look like a diploma.

Sometimes it is a woman earning her first income. Sometimes it is a girl opening a laptop and discovering a world she has been told is closed to her. Sometimes it is simply keeping a door to learning open.

Five years later, Afghan girls have not stopped wanting to learn. Teachers have not stopped teaching. Families have not stopped hoping.

The world cannot allow their courage to become an excuse for our complacency.

We must keep paying attention, keep investing in their education and economic independence, and refuse to accept the exclusion of Afghan women and girls as the new normal.

Meetra Alokozay
Executive Director
Sahar Education