🌅 Today’s stat: 20.5 million

Sunrise Stat
January 23, 2025

In the three years since the Taliban took power, the de facto authorities have subjected women and girls to more than 70 decrees and edicts targeting their personal autonomy and fundamental rights. Recently enacted “moral oversight laws” require complete body coverage and prohibit women from speaking in public or looking at men they aren’t related to by blood or marriage.

Afghanistan has become what U.N. officials say is the most repressive country in the world for women, with restrictions targeting their rights to work, study, and travel, among other things. The Taliban has also “systematically dismantled” protections against gender-based violence, including banning all women judges, lawyers, and prosecutors, severely restricting women’s access to justice.

The increasingly oppressive laws are fueling not only a humanitarian crisis but a looming development crisis, as the country’s youth population grows alongside an economy that can’t support them and an international aid network that’s reluctant to provide assistance due in large part to the Taliban’s restrictions on the population. The Afghan economy is projected to lose $9.6 billion, equivalent to about two-thirds of its GDP, by 2066 if the ban on women’s access to education remains in place.