The United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) said in a tweet that over 4 million children in Afghanistan are still out of schools and further informed that more than half of this figure is made up of girls.

The tweet reads, “In the past 3 months, #UNICEF supported 5,350 community-based education classes ensuring access to learning for more than 142,700 children across Afghanistan. Yet more needs to be done, over 4 million #children are still out of school, more than half are girls.”

Where do Afghanistan’s girls go?

UNICEF had earlier said in a tweet that they had received ‘credible reports’ of families offering daughters as young as 20 days old for future marriage in return for a dowry.

A statement by the UNICEF Executive Director read, “As most teenage girls are still not allowed to go back to school, the risk of child marriage is now even higher. Education is often the best protection against negative coping mechanisms such as child marriage and child labour.”

An estimate by UNICEF has also revealed that 28% of Afghan women aged 15-49 years were married before age 18.

Adding to its finding, UNICEF further tweeted, “The economic situation in #Afghanistan is extremely dire and this is pushing more families deeper into poverty and forcing them to make desperate choices, such as putting children to work and marrying girls off at a young age.”

What is being done to fix this?

According to the director’s statements, the extremely dire economic situation in Afghanistan is pushing more families deeper into poverty and forcing them to make desperate choices, such as putting children to work and marrying girls off at a young age.

The statements further read that UNICEF is working with partners to raise communities’ awareness of the risks for girls if they are married early along with providing cash assistance to help offset the risk of hunger, child labour and child marriage among the most vulnerable families.