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	Afghanistan: Girls Struggle for an Education by Human Rights Watch   Mar. 2018   No Shelter in Afghanistan, by Heather Barr - Senior Researcher, Women''s Rights Division   More than 8 out of 10 Afghan women and girls will suffer domestic and other violence in their lifetime. Before 2001, they had nowhere to run. These days there are some safe havens: the country’s tiny, but desperately important, network of women’s shelters.   But these shelters are now under attack – and not for the first time – by Afghanistan’s own government. Last month, the Ministry of Women’s Affairs (MoWA) announced plans to seize control of shelter funding provided by foreign donors, and instead require shelter operators to seek funding through the ministry. This might sound reasonable – a hallmark of President Ashraf Ghani’s government has been a push for greater government control over donor funds in the name of anti-corruption.   But we’ve seen this before. In 2011, MoWA also pushed for control of the shelters and used the same rhetoric as this time – alluding to “problems” in the refuges and suggesting – falsely – that shelters are brothels. But these abusive lies have been spread for years by opponents of women’s rights, who believe that women should have no safe haven from their husband no matter how violent and that a father or brother should have total control over the life – or death – of a woman.   In 2011, I was one of several lawyers who spent many hours reviewing the regulation MoWA sought to impose on shelters. It was clear that it intended to deprive women of refuge. Under the regulation, women would have been forced to convince a panel that they deserve shelter, and to undergo humiliating and medically meaningless “virginity tests.” Worst of all, they would have been turned over to their families at the relatives’ request – although nearly all were fleeing abuse from their own family.   In 2011, and in 2013 when MoWA tried again, international donors who fund the shelters fought back.   But foreign donor interest in Afghanistan has fallen dramatically. It is far from clear that they will fight again to save the shelters.   I have met Afghan women whose lives were saved by these refuges. I remember the fear in their eyes. If donors don’t act – and fast – they will have even more to fear. http://bit.ly/2FPkauh   Oct. 2017   Afghanistan: Girls Struggle for an Education   Afghan government and international donor efforts since 2001 to educate girls have significantly faltered in recent years, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released today. Sixteen years after the US-led military intervention in Afghanistan ousted the Taliban, an estimated two-thirds of Afghan girls do not attend school.   “The Afghan government and donors made bold promises in 2001 to get all girls into education, but insecurity, poverty, and displacement are now driving many girls out of school,” said Liesl Gerntholtz, women’s rights director at Human Rights Watch. “The government needs a renewed focus to ensure all girls have a school to attend or risk these gains being lost.”   The 132-page report, “I Won’t Be a Doctor, and One Day You’ll Be Sick: Girls’ Access to Education in Afghanistan,” describes how, as security in the country worsens and international donors disengage from Afghanistan, progress made toward getting girls into school has stalled. It is based on 249 interviews in Kabul, Kandahar, Balkh, and Nangarhar provinces, mostly with girls ages 11 to 18 who were not able to complete their education.   Girls’ education has often been highlighted as a success story by donors and the Afghan government, and millions more girls are in school today than were in school under Taliban rule. But the stated aim of getting all girls into school is far from realized, and the proportion of students who are girls is now falling in parts of the country. According to the government, 3.5 million children are out of school, and 85 percent of them are girls. Only 37 percent of adolescent girls are literate, compared to 66 percent of adolescent boys.   Afghanistan’s government provides fewer schools for girls than boys at both the primary and secondary levels. In half the country’s provinces, fewer than 20 percent of teachers are female – a major barrier for the many girls whose families will not accept their being taught by a man, especially as they become adolescents. Many children live too far from a school to attend, which particularly affects girls. About 41 percent of schools have no buildings, and many lack boundary walls, water, and toilets – disproportionately affecting girls.   Khatera, 15, raised in rural Samangan province, told Human Rights Watch, “It was very far to the nearest girls’ school – it was in another village…. On a donkey or horse, it would take from morning until noon.”   Girls are often kept home due to discriminatory attitudes that do not value or permit their education. A third of girls marry before 18, and once engaged or married, many girls are compelled to drop out of school.   But many families are also fighting desperately to educate their daughters in the face of enormous obstacles, and deserve support. Human Rights Watch spoke to families who moved across cities and even across the country to find a school for their daughters, who separated to allow girls to study, and who had older brothers make the dangerous trip to work illegally in Iran to pay school costs for their younger sisters back home.   Afghan law states that education is compulsory through class nine, when children normally would be about 14 years old, though in reality many children have no access to education to this level – or sometimes, to any level.   Administrative barriers and corruption create additional obstacles, especially for displaced and poor families. Even when tuition is free, there are costs for sending children to school and many families simply cannot afford to send any of their children or choose under financial constraints to favor educating sons. About a quarter of Afghan children work to help their families survive desperate poverty, and many girls weave, embroider, beg, or pick garbage rather than study.   The Taliban and other insurgents now control or contest more than 40 percent of Afghanistan’s districts. Fighting between Taliban and government forces has driven thousands of families from their homes, and more than a million Afghans are internally displaced. In areas under Taliban control, the Taliban often limits girls to only a few years of schooling, or bans them from education altogether.   In contested areas, girls seeking to attend school face heightened security threats. The conflict has been accompanied by lawlessness, as militias and criminal gangs have proliferated, and girls face threats including sexual harassment, kidnapping, and acid attacks, as well as targeted attacks and threats against girls’ education. In this environment, education is increasingly affected, and girls are disproportionately harmed.   Donors have worked with the Afghan government to develop innovative models that allow girls to study even amidst escalating conflict, Human Rights Watch said. “Community-based education” is a network of classes, often held in homes, that allow children, particularly girls, to access education in communities far from a government school.   But because these specialized classes are funded solely by donors and implemented by nongovernmental organizations, they have no consistent connection with the government school system and come and go due to the unreliable cycles of funding to nongovernmental organizations.   “Integrating these community-based schools in the government education system, with sustainable funding and quality controls, would be a lifeline for many girls,” Gerntholtz said.   According to international standards established by UNESCO, the government should spend at least 15 to 20 percent of total national budget, and 4 to 6 percent of GDP, on education. The United Nations urges that least developed countries, of which Afghanistan is one, should reach or exceed the upper end of these benchmarks. As of 2016, 13 percent of Afghanistan’s public expenditure, and 4 percent of GDP, was spent on education.   The Afghan government, with its international donors, should increase girls’ access to education by better protecting schools and students; institutionalizing and expanding education models that help girls study; and taking concrete steps to meet the government’s international obligation to provide universal free and compulsory primary education and help make secondary education free and available to all. They should also encourage and intensify “fundamental education” for those persons who have not received or completed the whole period of primary (or basic) education.   “Even amidst the great difficulties Afghanistan faces, the government can and should be working to ensure that girls and boys have equal access to education and to integrate girls’ community-based education into the national school system,” Gerntholtz said. “Donors should commit to long-term support for girls’ education and need to ask more hard questions about how their funds are being spent.” http://tmsnrt.rs/2yJZQ8t Visit the related web page
	Don’t Cut Women’s Programs. Embed Them! by Jemimah Njuki International Development Research Centre Canada   Every line in a budget — like electricity, water, and roads — affects women and girls differently than men and boys. This is why governments should practice “gender responsive budgeting.”   In the last few months, we’ve heard that the Trump administration has proposed funding cuts to several women’s programs, such as the State Department’s Office of Global Women’s Issues. And he isn’t alone. A recent assessment of the EU budget showed that funds allocated for gender equality had significantly been cut down between 2015 and 2016.   Some might say that President Trump is anti-women. But even if that’s part of it, there is a more structural reason why it’s so easy to cut funding to women-focused programs.   It would be a more difficult task to cut gender equality funding if it were embedded in the government budgeting process and not treated as separate or “special” programming.   A better way to address gender equality and the empowerment of women is through what some call “gender responsive budgeting.” The idea behind this approach is recognizing that every line in the budget can have very different impacts on women and girls than on men and boys.   Take water issues in Africa as an example. A study of 24 sub-Saharan African countries found that 17 million women and (mostly female) children spend more than half an hour every day fetching potable water for the household. Typically, governments think of water in terms of big infrastructure projects such as dams or large-scale irrigation systems. But more often, getting water to the “last mile” can be even more challenging.   When the Ministry of Water in Tanzania built gender considerations into their budget, resources to the ministry as a whole doubled. Rather than treating gender separately or relegating them to NGOs, the additional investment was embedded in the water budget.   There was clear acknowledgment that gender issues must be considered when thinking about water access.   Meanwhile, India has changed budget allocations to support gender equality in infrastructure by considering women’s sanitation needs as part of public infrastructure expenditure. This includes providing women’s toilets in public places like markets or transportation hubs. Investments like these matter because without them, women limit their participation in these public spaces, and thereby their economic prospects.   Decisions on what goods to tax can have different impacts on men and women and their households. In South Africa, one analysis found that removing taxes on certain foods and household fuels was comparatively more beneficial to women, while reducing taxes on alcohol, tobacco, and transport fuel resulted in higher benefits for men. This analysis led to the removal of taxes on paraffin, a main source of cooking fuel especially in poor households in the country. With women being the primary decision makers in households for food and nutrition, cheaper fuel translates into more money available for better and more nutritious food.   Despite the potential impact of gender responsive budgeting, most governments continue to fund gender equality and women’s empowerment as separate special programs and not as part of mainstream government budgeting processes. In Kenya, for example, the Women Enterprise Fund is set up as a semi-autonomous government agency to provide accessible and affordable credit to support women to start or expand businesses.   Some argue that these special programs are critical for closing persistent gender gaps. This may be true to an extent — but evidence shows that these programs are often the first to get cut. A 2010 survey conducted by Oxfam on the impact of the global economic crisis on the budgets of 56 low-income countries found that nearly two thirds had cut programs affecting gender equality.   Despite the power of gender responsive budgeting, many countries have not adopted them — or the programs remain mainly on paper.   But we are seeing some progress. In Canada, in a first critical step, the 2017 budget included a gender statement that identified the ways in which public policies affect women and men differently. The feminist international assistance policy announced in June gives a specific focus on gender equality and empowerment of girls, while also prioritizing women and girls in other key areas such as environment and climate action, inclusive governance, peace and security.   Political will is also required to ensure that countries embed gender responsive budgeting in their fiscal policies. While it may be more politically expedient for a government to announce they have set aside a couple of million dollars on a women’s fund, it is more sustainable in the long term to ensure all government funding has a positive impact on women and girls and on gender equality.   * Jemimah Njuki manages a portfolio of agriculture and food security, and women''s empowerment projects at the International Development Research Centre.   http://www.idrc.ca/en/resources/perspectives/dont-cut-womens-programs-embed-them http://www.idrc.ca/en/resources/perspectives/why-land-rights-women-are-critical Visit the related web page
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