A university professor tasked with ensuring Afghan girls continue to go to school has demanded international aid is used to negotiate with the Taliban.
Former prime minister Gordon Brown last week called for £5.7billion of support for education in the country to be overseen by Edinburgh University’s Liz Grant.
She is spearheading an international project to gather data on the treatment of women and girls under the new regime after the US and UK military withdrawal.
Grant, director of the Global Health Academy at the university, said: “The work we are doing is to monitor access to education for girls in Afghanistan, because the huge fear is that all the gains of the last 20 years are going to be completely wiped out.
“It is not very clear that education systems will stay but I believe they could stay if we go in with funding as a diplomatic negotiating tool as the country goes through this transition.
“We will bring together data of who is doing what so we can have an evidence base going down to where schools are being closed and who is being prevented from getting into education.
“It is that nitty-gritty access monitoring and what Gordon Brown envisages is that we can then use that evidence base to work with the UN.”
Aid leaders have urged the international community to use financial leverage to stop a reversal of two decades of advances in girls’ education.
Last week Unicef’s chief of field operations Mustapha Ben Messaoud told a UN briefing he was optimistic about working with Taliban officials to support girls in school.
When the Taliban last held power in 2001, only about 12 per cent of primary-aged girls attended lessons.
That increased to 50 per cent in 2015, and in 2020, 39 per cent of 9.5million children going to school in the country were girls.
Grant added: “There are obviously questions over who benefits from aid and at what point do you take the risk of bad individuals benefiting when the system of education is what you are trying to fund.
“But I believe we can’t pull out everything because the people who will be destroyed will be those who have nothing.
“The greatest failure would be a failure of hope.
“Those young people still have hope and to take that hope away would be unforgivable.
“I am not naive thinking that the Taliban will change but Afghanistan is more than just the Taliban and we need to hold on to that and we need to negotiate for hope.”
Grant, who also sits on the Scottish Government NHS Global Citizenship Board, added: “You can probably pick up that I am Northern Irish. I wouldn’t want to compare the Taliban and the IRA but where you have hatred, that can be dissipated through talking.
“Nothing is ever lost through talk. Fundamentally education is good, even when being delivered in a country where there is evil.
“Every culture has a right to make decisions on the roles of men and women but if you go behind that, at the end of the day we need to accept that humanity, male and female, is equal.
“If money is going in for education but only boys are being educated then there needs to be challenges to that.
“Hope is one of the most powerful things we have in the world and if we can give people hope in Afghanistan through aid then we can fund the economics of hope which allow change.”
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