“I always dreamed of being a lawyer and had been preparing to get into law school, but now with the Taliban taking over I don’t think I have a future.” - Roya, 18.

“If I am educated, men wouldn’t dare to interfere but if I am not, they will decide my whole life for me.” - Nasiba, 16.

“The Taliban is near our house. If we go to school, they will kill us.” - Paimanah, 12.

Girls are afraid. Afghanistan is in chaos after the Taliban’s takeover of the country, and they have deprived women of modern education. They say that women will be allowed to go to all-girls schools, yet only 16% of afghan schools meet the criteria. The founder of the first girl’s boarding school in Afghanistan, Shabana Basij-Rasikh, talked in August about how she burned all of her student’s records just to protect them. This is extremely ironic given that when the Taliban last occupied Afghanistan, they burned all of the female student’s records in order to “erase their existence”.

What we are asking for is change. We need to give women their education back, or else they won’t be able to receive something that we all take for granted. They are already struggling to get even a quarter of the education we receive on a daily basis.

I’ll be honest, I only started this as a small opportunity to educate myself amidst a project I was assigned for school. But now I realize that this is so much more than just that. This is about an entire country and its female citizens. I was just lucky to not be in that situation. But it could’ve been me, my mother, or my sister in that situation, and so I want as many people as possible to help afghan women get their right to education back. Because if we don’t help, who will?