No Aid Without Inclusion: Afghanistan’s Gendered Humanitarian Collapse
By: Maria Herr
“No one prioritizes women’s lives.” This is how a midwife in Afghanistan describes a woman who died in childbirth after local clinics were shuttered due to the collapse of international aid. This story, unfortunately, is not uncommon. Since the Taliban’s return to power in 2021, Afghanistan has become the only country in the world where girls are banned from secondary education, women cannot work, and humanitarian access is often contingent on male permission. But beyond the Taliban’s violent repression, another, quieter crisis has unfolded; one of abandonment. Afghanistan’s humanitarian emergency is unfolding along gendered lines, where women, girls, and gender minorities face more severe and disproportionate risks, yet receive the least support. When the international community pulled funding and froze assets, it intensified existing inequalities under extremist rule.
The international community’s failure to ensure safe, sustained, and gender-inclusive humanitarian access in Afghanistan has not just abandoned women and LGBTQ+ people, but it has also entrenched their vulnerability. Reversing this requires urgent, targeted action, including restoring funding to women-led non-governmental organizations (NGOs), ensuring gender expertise in all humanitarian delivery, and holding the Taliban accountable for its gender apartheid – a system of state-enforced segregation and domination based on gender. The term is gaining traction in international law, including within the UN’s ongoing negotiations over a Crimes Against Humanity Statute, which could classify gender apartheid as a prosecutable crime. Even under current frameworks, elements of this system – such as systemic persecution, denial of fundamental rights, and gender-based violence– already fall under existing categories of crimes against humanity and violations of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). States therefore have both a legal and moral obligation to investigate, condemn, and, where possible, sanction perpetrators under universal jurisdiction and existing human rights mechanisms.
The humanitarian disaster unfolding in Afghanistan is not a natural consequence of war. It is the result of deliberate choices, by both the Taliban and the international community, which have made the vulnerabilities of women and gender minorities into a crisis. When the Taliban seized Kabul in August 2021, they re-established their “Islamic Emirate” and quickly acted to erase women from public life. Women were banned from secondary schools in September 2021 and barred from universities in December 2022. According to UNESCO, at least 1.4 million Afghan girls have been deliberately deprived of schooling since the Taliban’s return to power in 2021. In addition to being banned from universities, they were also banned from working at NGO’s, and the Taliban extended this ban to the United Nations in April 2023. Women were also deprived of freedom of movement and required to abide by a strict dress code. For instance, women cannot travel more than 72 kilometers without a male guardian, and are required to wear full-body coverings, subject to criminal punishment if they do not abide by the rules. Furthermore, the Taliban dissolved the “Ministry of Women’s Affairs” and replaced it with the “Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice,” which enforces gender-based morality codes. All of these acts are calculated moves aimed at taking away any self-autonomy and representation that women once had. Governing through the enforcement of gender apartheid, using control over women’s dress, movement, education, and labor as a marker of regime strength, is a conscious strategy, one that has worked well.
This disaster was perpetuated by the 2020 Doha Agreement, which made no binding guarantees to protect the rights of women, girls, or LGBTQ+ people. In fact, there was not a single woman present at the Doha meetings in February, when the agreement was signed. After the Taliban imposed their restrictions, a significant withdrawal of aid followed. Although some international donors, such as the UN’s humanitarian agencies and the International Committee of the Red Cross, have continued limited operations in Afghanistan, overall funding for NGOs (particularly women-led ones) has largely been pulled, and international donors have retreated, causing basic services to collapse, including health services and access to food. As a result, some NGOs had to suspend operations entirely.
Humanitarian crises are not gender-neutral. They unfold along existing inequalities that already put women, girls, and gender minorities at risk. When donors and organizations fail to design aid systems with gender at the center, they not only overlook these groups, but actively exclude them. Without female staff working in NGOs, aid workers cannot effectively reach women and girls, especially in health, protections, and education sectors. When local operations shut down, countless women were unable to access aid because of restrictions by the Taliban, such as not being allowed to travel on their own. Female-headed households, which are already among the most food-insecure, face significant challenges obtaining food. Families are forced to sell their daughters in order to get food for their other children, which demonstrates how girls continue to be more severely affected, while also continuing to reinforce a patriarchal society.
Gender-based violence (GBV) services and legal aid are now almost entirely inaccessible in Afghanistan, as funding for national and subnational organizations responding to GBV largely ceased after 2020. Local, women-led organizations, many of which had actual experience supporting women, were sidelined in favor of larger actors. These new actors have often capitulated to Taliban restrictions rather than coordinated to protect women’s rights. Many halted the employment of Afghan women and, in some cases, even suspended the deployment of international female staff. Instead of leveraging the Taliban’s dependency on humanitarian aid to negotiate conditions for women’s participation, international agencies largely acquiesced, reinforcing women’s exclusion from both service delivery and decision-making. Pre-2021, aid to Afghanistan, although not perfect, increasingly involved women-led NGO’s and trained female professionals to deliver services. The system in its place now has led to a dismantling of effective support for women and girls.
Since the Taliban’s return, queer and trans people have also faced persecution that has gone unsupported. LGBTQ+ identities are not just taboo under Taliban rule; they are criminalized, violently suppressed, and used as justification for abuse and blackmail. LGBTQ+ Afghans report being hunted, assaulted, and threatened by Taliban members and community vigilantes alike. Despite these dangers, almost no aid frameworks in Afghanistan are designed to include LGBTQ+ people. There are no formal protections and no targeted services. Humanitarian aid that fails to name and reach LGBTQ+ people fails in its most basic mandate: to protect the most vulnerable.
The death of a woman in childbirth, the closed clinics, the girl sold to another man; these are not inevitable tragedies of war. They are the result of policy failures and of neglect. The international community cannot undo the Taliban’s rise, but it can choose whether to compound that harm or begin to repair it. Restoring dignity and protection for Afghan women and LGBTQ+ people begins with restoring access. This means resuming funding for women-led organizations that know how to reach the most vulnerable – such as those providing mobile health care, legal aid, and safehouse networks – and ensuring that funding channels bypass de facto authorities to prevent diversion. Additionally, gender expertise needs to be embedded into every stage of humanitarian planning, not as an afterthought, but as a requirement. Humanitarian agencies should be required to employ gender advisors in field missions and to make women’s full participation, both Afghan and international, a non-negotiable condition for program implementation. When the Taliban restrict female staff, international donors and UN bodies must respond collectively, not by scaling back, but by conditioning further funding and diplomatic engagement on the reinstatement of women aid workers. For LGBTQ+ Afghans, protection requires explicit naming in aid frameworks and prioritization in asylum systems that too often overlook queer suffering.
Accountability should also move from rhetoric to enforcement. Recognizing gender apartheid as a crime under international law would enable investigation by UN mechanisms and the International Criminal Court into systematic gender persecution. In the meantime, states can use existing tools: targeted sanctions*, expanded travel bans, and the freezing of Taliban officials’ assets, to penalize those enforcing gender repression.
*It is crucial that targeted sanctions be implemented correctly so as not to deepen the suffering of ordinary Afghans. Sanctions can be an effective accountability tool only when they focus on Taliban leaders, financiers, and entities directly responsible for repression, rather than the broader economy. To avoid humanitarian fallout, states must include explicit carve-outs and general licenses allowing the flow of food, medicine, salaries, and NGO operations. The UN’s humanitarian exemption (Security Council Res. 2664), the EU’s terrorism-list humanitarian exception, and U.S. OFAC’s Afghanistan General Licenses all provide models for maintaining aid while restricting perpetrators. Governments should also issue banking guidance to prevent “de-risking”, conduct regular reviews, and create rapid waiver mechanisms. When designed this way, targeted sanctions freeze officials’ assets and impose travel bans without starving the population, ensuring accountability is smart, not punitive.
The world must recognize gender apartheid under international law and hold the Taliban accountable for enforcing it. The humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan is far from over. But how we respond now will decide whether this becomes a turning point in how the world shows up for those most at risk.