By the time Tahmina Ataee arrived at Bard College Berlin, she had already studied under three education systems, crossed two borders, and learned four languages. But the opportunity that once made her journey possible has disappeared for nearly all Afghan girls, as the door that once led to education and brighter futures is being forcibly shut.
Over the past two decades, a generation of Afghan women proved what was possible when educational doors were open. As Afghan sociologist Abdul Wahid Gulrani explains, the transformation of women’s education after 2001 was not simply academic. “Girls who grew up in dusty courtyards and unsafe neighborhoods suddenly entered classrooms, universities, and public life. They became teachers, journalists, and community leaders,” he said. For women like Tahmina, it meant the chance to imagine a different future.
Today, Afghanistan stands out tragically as the only country in the world where secondary and higher education are forbidden to girls and women, according to UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. The agency estimates in 2025 that nearly 2.2 million girls are now banned from attending school “beyond the primary level,” a reality UNESCO warns almost wiped out two decades of progress for education in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, “women have been banned from universities” since December 2022, cutting off one of the few pathways for higher learning, UNESCO reports. The consequences of these actions are profound. UNESCO estimates the “suspension of women’s higher education alone” is expected to cost the country up to US$9.6 billion in lost potential by 2066.
Today, formal schooling for many Afghan girls has been driven into hiding. According to NPR, some teenage girls now attend secret tutoring centers hidden in basements and private homes, where they study English, the Quran, and high-school level subjects. As Gulrani observes, “education in Afghanistan is not dead, it has gone underground.” “Across the country, girls continue to study secretly in homes, basements, and informal community classes. Some are taking online courses through their phones and laptops. Mothers are teaching daughters at home,” Gulrani said. This quiet but resilient movement, he says, shows that “while the Taliban can close schools, they cannot extinguish the will to learn.”
In this landscape of shrinking horizons, stories like Tahmina Ataee’s stand out as a glimpse of the talent and ambition now at risk. In Kabul, her education reflected the mix of schools that emerged after 2001, when private, international, and public institutions expanded opportunities for girls. She first attended a global private school, then an all-girls Turkish high school where, as she put it, “we had to learn everything twice, once in Persian and once in English.” She even enrolled in an American university in Kabul before her education was disrupted by the Taliban takeover.
Ataee’s path is not unusual for her generation. She is part of a generation of Afghan women whose lives were shaped by two decades of expanded access to education. Between 2001 and 2021, millions of girls entered classrooms for the first time as private and international schools opened alongside a growing public system. Many of those students later left the country, some as refugees and others on scholarships; however, their education enabled them to build new futures abroad.
Still, national progress often masked the realities inside individual classrooms. For Ataee, the experience looked very different from many of her peers. In Kabul, her classmates were often the daughters of politicians and businessmen, while she was the only Hazara ethnic minority student in her grade. The difference, she said, wasn’t only social. “They put a lot of emphasis on religion and like religious practice,” she said. “We even had a mosque inside the school. That was uncommon.”
Religious expectations felt unfamiliar to her. “I have not grown up to be like that,” she said. “My dad is a very, very non-religious person. My mom has had a bit of a background, but she’s also chill.” Yet pressure to conform was constant. “It’s also not peer pressure, but I guess it is, because they’d be like, oh, it’s lunch break, we have an hour-long lunch, and I would go eat first, but they’re like, no, we have to go pray,” she said. “I wouldn’t call it brainwash, but I was also traumatized, so I would call it that.”
At home, faith mattered less than education. Her father, who worked for a German nonprofit in Afghanistan, encouraged her to focus on learning. Among Hazara families, this emphasis on education was common. “Not only just my family but friends I know and also relatives, they put a lot of emphasis on education,” she said. “They always like push their kids to study.”
Tahmina’s education was interrupted when the Taliban captured Kabul in August 2021. “We had to leave everything behind,” she said. “We used to live in a flat, and then everything we owned was gone. I don’t have that sort of attachment to materials anymore.” With help from her father’s German employer, her family left Afghanistan, first to Pakistan and then to Germany. “We were one of the first families they got out,” she said.
Arriving in Germany, Tahmina recalled, “it was a bit chaotic when we got here as well, because they thought we were undocumented or, like, illegally entering, which was not the case.” They spent their first weeks in quarantine camps, navigating new rules and procedures. “It was scary because you don’t know what’s going to happen,” she said. “One day they’d wake you up to do blood tests or like very procedural things, but like to us, I was like, what are we doing?”
As they settled, Tahmina continued her studies online. Before leaving Afghanistan, she had been enrolled “in an American school,” she said. “Then, because of the whole takeover, they were like, okay, our current students can continue their studies online without any tuition, so that’s how I was able to do two semesters while I was in Germany.”
When the university reopened a branch in Qatar, she realized she could not continue there. “I was like, this is not going to happen because I’d have to be there,” she said. “My brother was like, oh, there’s a branch here, you can apply.” At the time, she was learning German and preparing to apply to a local university. “Everyone had the same sort of plan,” she said. “You study German, get to university level, and then apply to a German school. That was my idea of how it’s going to be.” Ultimately, Bard College Berlin offered a different path. “I applied and I checked and I was like, oh, okay, I guess I got accepted,” she said, laughing.
Now at Bard, Tahmina is excelling academically, consistently earning top grades. She is also channeling her experience into research on Afghanistan’s brain drain, investigating why the country’s brightest students and professionals leave and how the loss of educated women affects Afghan society. “I’m trying to understand how the talent that was built in the country can be sustained, there is not a lot of research on it,” she said.
Tahmina said the past few months have been a period of intense transition. “It has been quite a chaotic month as I’ve been finishing my senior project,” she said. Completing her bachelor’s degree, she added, feels like “one of my biggest academic achievements so far.” She has also stayed involved with Ejaad Berlin, an initiative that financially supports Afghan women through embroidery. “I haven’t held a formal leadership role,” she explained, “but being part of it has helped me strengthen my reporting and communication skills.” Beyond that, she has taken on several jobs over the past few years, including two and a half years as an Orientation Leader and a position as a German tutor. Since July, she has also been working with the examination department at another private university. “All in all, these experiences, big or small, have made me feel proud of how far I’ve come,” she said.
For Tahmina, her education is deeply important. The barriers she faced in Afghanistan, and the millions of girls whose education is now stifled, inform her understanding of what is at stake. Her work highlights both the potential of educated women and the societal cost when that potential is denied. She hopes her future job will do more than study the problem as she hopes to work for an organization that helps people.
While Tahmina’s departure marked a significant loss for Afghanistan, she is not the only young Afghan woman whose education has been disrupted by the Taliban. Madina Sarabi, another student from Kabul, also had to leave her home country to continue her studies.
Madina grew up in Kabul, attending school in Afghanistan until 10th grade. She said she loved her school, describing it as a place that helped students “grow academically and grow socially” and offered extracurricular activities such as drawing and painting classes. Her family, she explained, “really prioritized education” and invested in courses and programs to help her and her siblings succeed.
Her education, however, was abruptly halted in 2021 when the Taliban regained control. Madina recalled leaving school during a history exam as staff and security guards told all students to evacuate. While boys eventually returned, girls were barred indefinitely. She described this period as one filled with fear, “Fear was always there…if I didn’t follow the rules, I could get arrested.” Despite the risks, she continued participating in school programs and cultural events wherever possible.
Madina was determined to continue her education abroad, but obtaining a student visa proved challenging. Because Afghanistan had no functioning embassies, she first had to travel to Iran to process her Italian visa. “It was risky because if the Taliban would know that I was going out of the country,” “they would not allow me,” she said. She eventually secured the visa and traveled alone to Italy to complete the International Baccalaureate at UWC Adriatic, a two-year pre-university program.
In Italy, Madina adapted to a new academic system taught in English, which she described as “one of the hardest educational systems in the world.” She also took part in social initiatives, volunteering at a women’s shelter and participating in arts and crafts programs for women facing domestic violence.
Madina is now a student at Bard College Berlin, studying politics, economics, and social thought in a seminar-based program. She participates in Afghan student initiatives, including the Afghan Development Academy, and engages in student-led projects and discussions. She said Bard has provided “a lot of opportunities and spaces to get educated in every topic” and allows students to start their own initiatives.
Madina’s journey highlights what Afghanistan has lost due to the Taliban’s restrictions on education. Her intelligence, leadership, and dedication to learning, which could have contributed to her home country, are now being realized abroad. Reflecting on her peers still in Afghanistan, she said, “They are so brave, they are so courageous, and they’re so resilient…if I made it out, I was no better than them. They all can do it.”
Afghanistan’s loss is visible not only in the students forced abroad, but also in the women who went on to build influential careers overseas after being pushed from home, women like Zulaikha Aziz.
Zulaikha Aziz immigrated to the United States as a child, and the path she built for herself was shaped by an unwavering belief in education. She went on to earn a bachelor’s degree from McGill University, a Master of Science from the London School of Economics, and a law degree from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. After completing her studies, she returned to Afghanistan in 2002 to work on development projects, focusing intensely on expanding opportunities for women in rural areas. “A lot of my focus [is] integrating women into our activities,” she recalled, describing the early post-Taliban years when rebuilding the country meant ensuring women could once again participate in public life.
During her work, however, she began to see the limitations of development without law. “None of the work that we were doing would make a lasting impact if there weren’t legal structures… guaranteeing people’s rights and… a way to enforce those rights,” she said. Motivated by that realization, she shifted paths, embracing legal education and human-rights advocacy, eventually working with international organizations on governance and legal-rights projects.
After many years in law and human-rights work, Aziz found herself drawn back to an earlier passion, jewelry. Jewelry had been “the only tangible thing that my family was able to bring out,” she said, heirlooms handed down by her grandmother that were now symbols of culture, memory, and identity. Burnout and the weight of conflict pushed her to reconsider her path. “I was so burnt out on my last assignment in Afghanistan that I was like, okay, I’m going to take some time to really explore my creative side,” she recalled.
Back in the United States in 2019, she enrolled in the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) in California, a move that would mark the birth of her new vision. By March 2021, she launched Mazahri, naming it after her grandmother. The brand revived traditional Afghan motifs and embedded them within fine jewelry made from 18-karat gold, ethically sourced gemstones, and carefully crafted designs.
From the beginning, ethical sourcing and social responsibility were non-negotiable for Aziz. She insisted that all pieces use only certified materials like fairmined gold, traceable stones where possible, and production by small, fairly treated artisanal workshops. She said she was “adamant that the materials I use had to be materials that were not causing more harm to people or the environment.”
The reception to Mazahri was strong and immediate. Collectors and clients responded not just to the craftsmanship, but to the story behind the jewelry. Her pieces attracted attention and sales. Online customers around the world began to place orders.
Running a jewelry business is never easy, she admits, but for Zulaikha, it is a labor of love. Her legal training helps her navigate the practical side of business, while her cultural heritage shapes the vision and meaning behind each piece. From the very beginning, she built her company with a purpose beyond profit, supporting Afghan women and girls.
As she explained, “profits from sales go to helping women’s rights or girls’ rights. So we partnered with Women for Afghan Women our first few years. And then this year, we are partnering with Malala Fund to support their Afghanistan initiative.” The new collection, she added, was “inspired by Afghan girls and their fighting for their right to equal access of education.”
Through Mazahri, Aziz transformed hardship into a story of creativity, ethics, and success. Her journey shows what happens when education, identity, and determination converge. Afghanistan may have lost her. But the world gained a steward of its heritage, a champion for ethical craftsmanship, and a tangible reminder of the talent that a country lost when so many were forced to leave.
The stories of Tahmina Ataee, Madina Sarabi, and Zulaikha Aziz highlight both the talent Afghanistan has lost and the resilience its women continue to show. Forced abroad by the Taliban’s restrictions, they have turned education, creativity, and determination into paths for impact. While their country has been deprived of their full potential, their achievements abroad serve as a testament to what Afghan women can accomplish when given the opportunity.
