Taliban ban Afghans from working for NGOs

The Taliban government in Afghanistan has ordered all local and foreign non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to prevent their employees from going to work, according to a letter from the Economy Ministry, confirmed on Saturday by its spokesman, Abdulrahman Habib.

The text prohibits the employees of these organizations from continuing to work "until further notice", and justifies this new ban on the country's women alleging "serious allegations" that some of them do not respect the rigid Islamic dress code that the Taliban wants to impose to the Afghans.

"There have been serious complaints about non-compliance with the Islamic hijab and other rules and regulations regarding women's work in national and international organizations," said the Ministry of Economy, which is in charge of approving permits for NGOs operating in the country.

This new restriction, which adds jobs in the humanitarian sector to the list of jobs already banned for women, comes four days after, on December 20, the Taliban banned women from studying at the university, a measure that vetoes education for all Afghans over the age of 12, after fundamentalists closed down all girls' secondary schools.

The announcement not only plunged many young Afghan women into despair, who appeared in tears in videos posted on social media, but it sparked a new wave of international condemnation.

It is not yet clear how this ban will affect the agencies of the United Nations system, which have a large presence in Afghanistan and whose assistance is considered essential to guarantee the survival of millions of Afghans mired in a serious human crisis.

When the spokesman was asked if this ban included UN agencies, Habib said the letter applied to organizations that report to the coordinating body for humanitarian organizations, known as ACBAR.

This entity does not include United Nations agencies but more than 180 local and international NGOs.

The UN, however, often subcontracts to NGOs to carry out its humanitarian projects.

essentials

The aid worker community in Afghanistan believes that female NGO employees, Afghan and foreign, are critical to ensuring that Afghan recipients can access aid.

In large parts of Afghanistan, cultural practices prohibit a man from speaking to, examining or offering humanitarian assistance to women who are not close relatives.

These practices, aggravated by the strict separation of the sexes that the Taliban have imposed, prohibit, for example, a male doctor from attending to a woman in childbirth, even if the life of the woman in labor or that of the baby is in danger.

In fact, the shortage of toilets in Afghanistan continues to be, according to various international studies, one of the barriers that prevents the reduction of maternal mortality.

In September 2021, less than a month after the Taliban retook power that they had held between 1996 and 2001, Filipe Ribeiro, then a representative of Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in Afghanistan, assured this newspaper that the Taliban had guaranteed to his organization that his workers would not have problems.

Follow all the international information on