An announcement by the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, also known as the Taliban, to bar women from studying in medical institutes will have far-reaching consequences for women’s health in the country, said Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) today.
This is another stage in the removal of women from public and professional life in Afghanistan. Already, there is an insufficient number of female health care workers in the country, impacting the availability of health care, especially given the separation of hospital wards by gender. New constraints will further restrict access to quality health care and pose serious dangers to its availability in the future.
“There is no health care system without educated female health practitioners,” said Mickael Le Paih, MSF’s country representative in Afghanistan. “At MSF, more than 50 percent of our medical staff are women. The decision to bar women from studying at medical institutes will further exclude them from both education and the impartial provision of health care.”
The medical needs in Afghanistan are huge, and more female Afghan medical staff need to be trained to address them. For this to happen, women need to have access to education. Education restrictions for women and girls put in place in 2024, 2022, and 2021 considerably reduce the number of female medical staff in the future.
In Khost, one of MSF’s busiest maternity wards worldwide, it is already challenging to fill all necessary positions—including midwives and gynecologists—and female staff are essential for maternal health care programs. From January to June 2024, MSF assisted 22,300 deliveries.
“If no girls can attend secondary school, and no women can attend university or medical institutes, where will the female health professionals of the future come from and who will attend to Afghan women when they are at their most vulnerable?” said Le Paih. “For essential services to be available to all genders, they must be delivered by all genders.”
MSF remains committed to serving all those in need of medical care in Afghanistan. We continue to advocate for women to have access to medical education, and education more broadly.
About our work in Afghanistan
MSF runs seven projects in Helmand, Kunduz, Herat, Khost, Kandahar, and Bamyan with a particular focus on delivering secondary health care. In 2023, MSF teams were responsible for over 132,600 outpatient consultations, 96,000 inpatient admissions, 383,600 emergency room consultations, 15,200 surgical interventions, and assisted 45,260 deliveries. More than 10,000 patients were enrolled in outpatient therapeutic feeding centers and 12,500 patients admitted to inpatient therapeutic feeding centers.
