ECONOMY AND WORK – The Challenge of Remaining Human

Afghanistan in 2023 continues to represent the largest humanitarian crisis in the world, with GDP having decreased by 35% over the past eighteen months, the cost of the food basket increasing by 30%, and unemployment reaching 40% of the active population, while 75% of income is spent solely on food (UN News). Over the past forty years of wars and occupation, Afghans have never faced an economic crisis as severe as the one triggered by the return of the Taliban to power.

In 2022, over 90% of the population experienced food insecurity: tens of millions of people suffered from hunger, and child mortality due to persistent malnutrition increased (Human Rights Watch, Report 2023). Poverty has forced people into “drastic measures” to obtain minimal sustenance, from selling essential household items to putting children to work, marrying off young girls and child brides for dowries, and even selling their own organs for transplants (PAM).

While everyone suffers, women are disproportionately bearing the brunt of the economic and social crisis. Due to increasingly restrictive rules on their movement, work, and human and social rights, women’s opportunities to work outside the home and obtain food for themselves and their children, access healthcare, or find financial resources have been drastically reduced. The ban on traveling without a male relative, even when widowed or the sole breadwinner, has made them even poorer and has pushed their children into the harshest child labor: in 2022, 29% of families headed by women had at least one child working in brick factories, construction sites, homes, waste collection, or begging on the streets (Save the Children).

In 2022, employment levels plummeted for everyone, with almost 450,000 jobs disappearing. However, while male employment decreased by 7%, female employment dropped by 25%, as did youth employment. Working from home has become the predominant form of women’s participation in the labor market, rendering them invisible and increasingly vulnerable (ILO Brief, 2023).

Even women who had managed to study and held professional positions saw all opportunities disappear. The restrictive Taliban laws have almost entirely eliminated jobs that were a hard-won achievement for part of the female population over the past twenty years, those who had managed to achieve or at least dream of escaping subordination and segregation. Judges, journalists, doctors, nurses, teachers… are now persecuted and confined, and with the latest decrees, even NGO and UN workers have been banned from working, making humanitarian aid and women’s access to healthcare even more difficult.

As noted in the June 2023 report from the UN Human Rights Council, female businesses have been severely impacted by the restrictive policies introduced: female entrepreneurs’ incomes have plummeted, often preventing them from paying their employees; some entrepreneurs reported that some suppliers refuse to sell them materials on the grounds that a woman should not be running a business and that, at the very least, they should be accompanied by a mahram.

As our colleague Maryam Rawi from RAWA says, “Today in Afghanistan, even just being a human being is an enormous challenge.”