Female employment in Afghanistan has dropped by a quarter after the Taliban took over the country, according to estimates from the International Labour Organization (ILO), which said the fall was exacerbated by restrictions on women working and studying.
The ILO said the 25 percent drop in female employment took place by the final quarter of last year from the second quarter of 2021, compared with a 7 percent drop for men.
The Taliban took over the country in August 2021 as foreign forces withdrew.
Photo: Reuters
“Restrictions on girls and women have severe implications for their education and labour market prospects,” said Ramin Behzad, the senior coordinator for Afghanistan at the ILO, said in a statement accompanying its assessment for last year of Afghanistan.
Taliban authorities have barred most girls from high school, stopped women from attending universities and most female non-governmental organization workers from working.
Afghanistan’s economy has also been plunged into a crisis that has wiped out jobs. Following the Taliban takeover, foreign governments withdrew development aid and froze the nation’s central bank assets.
The ILO estimated that GDP contracted by 30 to 35 percent across 2021 and last year.
Taliban officials have called on the international community to unfreeze its assets to ease the country’s liquidity crisis, and have said they are focused on encouraging trade and investment to create economic self-sufficiency.
Youth unemployment also shrank by an estimated 25 percent for those aged 15 to 24. The ILO said that total employment had shown some signs of recovery in the first half of last year, but it decreased for young men and all women over the year.
“Some women moved into self-employed activities, such as farming ... or repairing clothes, thereby contributing to household income and preventing female employment from falling by even more,” the ILO report said.
Malaysia yesterday installed a motorcycle-riding billionaire sultan as its new king in lavish ceremonies for a post seen as a ballast in times of political crises. The coronation ceremony for Malaysia’s King Sultan Ibrahim, 65, at the National Palace in Kuala Lumpur followed his oath-taking in January as the country’s 17th monarch. Malaysia is a constitutional monarchy, with a unique arrangement that sees the throne change hands every five years between the rulers of nine Malaysian states headed by centuries-old Islamic royalty. While chiefly ceremonial, the position of king has in the past few years played an increasingly important role. Royal intervention was
X-37B COMPARISON: China’s spaceplane is most likely testing technology, much like US’ vehicle, said Victoria Samson, an official at the Secure World Foundation China’s shadowy, uncrewed reusable spacecraft, which launches atop a rocket booster and lands at a secretive military airfield, is most likely testing technology, but could also be used for manipulating or retrieving satellites, experts said. The spacecraft, on its third mission, was last month observed releasing an object, moving several kilometers away and then maneuvering back to within a few hundred meters of it. “It’s obvious that it has a military application, including, for example, closely inspecting objects of the enemy or disabling them, but it also has non-military applications,” said Marco Langbroek, a lecturer in optical space situational awareness at Delft
The Philippine Air Force must ramp up pilot training if it is to buy 20 or more multirole fighter jets as it modernizes and expands joint operations with its navy, a commander said yesterday. A day earlier US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that the US “will do what is necessary” to see that the Philippines is able to resupply a ship on the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) that Manila uses to reinforce its claims to the atoll. Sullivan said the US would prefer that the Philippines conducts the resupplies of the small crew on the warship Sierra Madre,
AIRLINES RECOVERING: Two-thirds of the flights canceled on Saturday due to the faulty CrowdStrike update that hit 8.5 million devices worldwide occurred in the US As the world continues to recover from massive business and travel disruptions caused by a faulty software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, malicious actors are trying to exploit the situation for their own gain. Government cybersecurity agencies across the globe and CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz are warning businesses and individuals around the world about new phishing schemes that involve malicious actors posing as CrowdStrike employees or other tech specialists offering to assist those recovering from the outage. “We know that adversaries and bad actors will try to exploit events like this,” Kurtz said in a statement. “I encourage everyone to remain vigilant