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By Harriet Barber, Zuhal Azad and Tamanna Taban
This report is published in collaboration with the Guardian .
The stark figures show that since the hardliners seized power in 2021, women have been erased from public life, poverty is forcing hopeless families to marry off their daughters and healthcare is on the brink of failure.
I married off my daughter so that none of us would die of hunger.” Malika hesitated before saying the words aloud. The 46-year-old lives with her husband and four youngest children (three girls and a boy) in Chihil Dukhtarān, one of Kabul’s poorest neighbourhoods.
Poverty pushed the family to the brink before Malika and her husband made what they describe as the hardest decision of their lives: marrying off their eldest daughter, Maryam, for 200,000 afghanis (£2,270). She was still a teenager.
“God is my witness that during that winter, our food was almost nothing but dry bread and boiled water. Even that was often unavailable, and many nights we went to bed hungry,” she says.
“My poor daughter cried in secret … [but knew] if she refused this marriage, all of us would die from hunger, cold and misery.”
Almost two years on from Maryam’s marriage, crisis again looms for the family. Malika can no longer afford to send her two youngest daughters (aged 12 and nine) to school, so they work alongside their 16-year-old sister in a clothing factory for meagre wages. Her husband’s job is pushing a handcart, but he often returns home empty-handed – one of millions of Afghans out of work in a crippled economy. The dowry money has almost run out. Like many Afghan families, they have one resource left to tap: their girls.
Five years after the Taliban swept back into Kabul, Afghanistan has entered a quieter phase of emergency.
The fighting that once dominated international headlines has largely faded from view, but for millions of Afghans the crisis has only deepened. Nearly half the population requires humanitarian aid and more than 14 million people are expected to face acute food insecurity this year, while rights have been mercilessly restricted, women systematically erased from public life and millions of deportees forced back to an economy unable to absorb them.
An economy collapsing
The economy remains far smaller and more isolated than it was before the Taliban returned to power. Foreign trade has plummeted, and imports have increasingly outpaced exports since 2021, widening the country’s trade deficit.. Government finances have also contracted significantly. The Taliban’s most recent published budget, for the 2023 fiscal year, totalled $2.44bn, less than half the roughly $6bn budget under the previous government in 2021. In 2024, the authorities also abolished Afghanistan’s public pension system as they sought to cope with the country’s fiscal crisis.
Economic output is expanding, yet it is struggling to keep pace with rapid population growth driven by the return of millions of Afghans owing to deportation drives in Pakistan and Iran.
Inflation has added to those pressures. After averaging 3.6% in 2025, it rose to 7.6% by March 2026, driven by increasing food prices, supply disruptions and rising demand, further eroding household purchasing power.
Unemployment has almost doubled since 2021, according to the UN. More than half a million jobs have disappeared and cuts to international aid have hollowed out public spending, while rising food prices have once again squeezed household budgets.
“Five years after the Taliban takeover, Afghanistan is experiencing the world’s worst women’s rights crisis, one of the worst human rights crises and one of the worst humanitarian crises,” said Fereshta Abbasi, Afghanistan researcher at Human Rights Watch.
Years of economic hardship, successive droughts and collapsing international aid have left millions unable to afford basic goods. The numbers are staggering. An estimated 21.9 million people – about 45% of the population – will require humanitarian assistance in 2026. About 11.6 million are children, with 3.5 million under-fives already suffering from acute malnutrition.
But that aid is not arriving. The US, once the country’s largest donor, provided more than $3bn in humanitarian and development assistance between October 2021 and December 2024. But in January 2025, President Donald Trump suspended US humanitarian funding for Afghanistan as part of a pause on all foreign aid programmes, removing a source that had accounted for about 45% of humanitarian support.
The consequences have been immediate. More than 440 health clinics have been forced to close or reduce services because of funding shortages, increasing the proportion of Afghans without access to healthcare from 16% in 2024 to 23% in 2025. Earlier this year, the World Food Programme said it now turned away three out of four acutely malnourished children seeking help because it no longer had the funds to buy food for them.
The annihilation of women’s rights
The humanitarian crisis has unfolded alongside a sweeping assault on women’s rights.
Since seizing power in 2021, the Taliban have barred girls from secondary schools, banned women from universities, excluded them from much of the workforce and public life. In 2022, women were barred from public parks and gyms; in 2024, the Taliban prohibited women from speaking audibly in public, and this year a brutal new marriage law has perpetuated domestic violence and child abuse by effectively recognising child marriage and making it much harder for women to seek divorce.
Zarifa Ghafari, formerly mayor of Maidan Shahr, and one of Afghanistan’s few female mayors, who fled the country in August 2021, says Afghan women and girls have experienced one of the “fastest and most systematic reversals of women’s rights in modern history”.
The consequences are visible across almost every measure of equality. Women’s labour force participation has fallen from about one in six women before the Taliban takeover to roughly one in 20 today. Only 18% of midwives are formally employed, while nearly 80% of female journalists have been forced from their jobs. The UN estimates that excluding women and girls from education and work is already costing Afghanistan at least $84m a year. Afghanistan no longer keeps any records of its child marriage rates, and has also prevents NGOs from gathering data.
But as girls are forced from school and parents struggle to feed their children, rights organisations believe more and more are being pushed into child marriage – with the economic and gender rights crises compounding one another.
Last year, Nilofar, a 13-year-old girl from Bamiyan, completed the sixth grade (year 7) – the final year girls are allowed to attend school. Her small frame makes her look even younger than her age. Her parents have engaged her to be married to an older relative she has never met.
“My parents tell me that now your education is over, it’s time to get married. Keeping a grown daughter at home is a heavy burden,” she says.
Afghanistan now ranks at the bottom of the Georgetown Institute’s Women, Peace and Security Index for measures of women’s inclusion, justice and security. The UN and human rights organisations have described the systematic dismantling of women’s rights as gender apartheid.
“Millions of girls have grown up knowing only exclusion instead of opportunity,” Ghafari says. “The Taliban are not only harming individual lives; they are depriving Afghanistan of doctors, teachers, engineers, entrepreneurs and future leaders. The damage will be felt for generations.” The rise of child marriage exposes girls to high rates of violence and abuse, as well as the prospect of pregnancy and childbirth at a very young age.
At the end of a crowded hospital corridor in Kabul, Shamim, 17, cradles a child in her arms as she waits to see a doctor. She looks more like a schoolgirl than a mother bringing her child to a hospital for treatment.
When approached and asked about the baby in her arms, she replies quietly, without looking up: “He’s my son.” She was forced, along with all other Afghan girls, to leave the school system in sixth grade (about 12 years old). By age 15, she was married, and less than a year later she was pregnant with her first child. Her marriage brought her family 200,000 afghanis, she says. A small portion went to buying household items, and “they used the remaining amount to pay off their debts”.
Geopolitical tensions rise
The country’s internal crises have been compounded by the forced return of millions of Afghans, mostly from neighbouring Iran and Pakistan.
Since 2023, almost 6 million people have returned after intensified crackdowns on undocumented migrants. The UN expects another 2.7 million returns between May and December this year, placing further strain on housing, jobs, healthcare and schools.
“No country can absorb that much population increase, especially a country like Afghanistan where half of the country is already in need of assistance,” says Mihyung Park, chief of mission in Afghanistan for International Organization for Migration.
Relations with Pakistan have also deteriorated sharply. Islamabad accuses the Taliban of harbouring militants from the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan group – allegations the Taliban denies. The dispute has spilled into armed clashes along the border, with exchanges of fire and airstrikes killing civilians and forcing families to flee on both sides. Repeated border closures have also disrupted trade and livelihoods in communities that depend on cross-border movement.
Yet even as rights have continued to deteriorate, the Taliban has steadily expanded its international reach.
Russia has formally recognised the government and signed a military cooperation agreement, while China and the United Arab Emirates have accepted Taliban-appointed ambassadors. Taliban officials have also met European Union representatives in Brussels to discuss migration, prompting criticism from human rights groups.
“Recognising the Taliban without meaningful progress on human rights risks legitimising a system built on gender apartheid,” says Ghafari.
As governments reopen diplomatic channels, many Afghans fear the world is learning to live with a regime that they cannot escape.
“Stability cannot be achieved by sacrificing half the population,” Ghafari says. “To Afghan women, it sends the message that geopolitical interests are outweighing their fundamental rights and freedoms.”
