Posted by: Guest Author
March 9, 2026

By Muzhda, UNICEF Canada Youth Advocate 

As children in many parts of  Afghanistan return to school this March, classrooms will begin to fill again. Notebooks will open, and playgrounds will grow busy. But for many Afghan girls, the school gates will remain closed. This season always takes me back to my own first day of school in Afghanistan.

It was a spring morning in the Baharak district of Badakhshan province, Afghanistan. I was six years old, walking to school for the first time with my friends, dressed in my black-and-white uniform, carrying the blue UNICEF backpack I had received just days earlier on enrollment day. We held our notebooks close, filled with excitement and possibility. We did not yet understand the full power of education, but we could already feel the promise it held.

In a country shaped by years of ongoing conflict and deep inequality, education meant more than learning to read and write. School was a protection. It was a safety net. It delayed child marriages, gave girls the chance to learn about their rights, and allowed us to imagine futures beyond survival.

On that first day, our teacher asked a simple question: Who do you want to become in the future?

The classroom filled with excitement. We raised our hands and proudly imagined a future where we become doctors, engineers, lawyers, journalists,  teachers, businesswomen, mayors, and leaders.

Years have passed since that day. Very few girls from that school made it to university. From my first-grade friend group, I am the only one who did.

In 2021, when the Taliban came into power, girls’ secondary and higher education were banned. My family and I were forced to leave our home and became refugees before being resettled in Canada, where we now live. Here, I was given a second chance. I restarted high school, graduated two years later, and I am now pursuing my undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto. But my friends and millions of other girls just were not given that chance. And unless this situation changes, they may never be.

Afghanistan stands out tragically as the only country in the world where secondary and higher education is strictly forbidden to girls and women. According to UNICEF and UNESCO, 2.2 million adolescent girls have been banned from attending secondary school, severely limiting their future opportunities and the country’s development. If this ban continues, millions more girls will lose not only their education, but their futures, putting lives at risk through increased child marriage, poverty, and a devastating shortage of female health workers.

UNICEF continues to support a holistic approach to education recovery in Afghanistan. This includes rehabilitating schools, strengthening teacher capacity, expanding foundational learning, and supporting skills development for young people, particularly girls and women excluded from formal schooling.

Every girl deserves the right to education. This is why, through my advocacy work, I'm urging governments, advocates, educators, innovators and us all to use our power and platforms to demand the immediate restoration of girls’ education in Afghanistan. Education cannot be conditional, delayed, or denied.

Muzhda is a youth advocate for girls’ education and refugee rights, and a UNICEF Canada Youth Advocate. She is the founder of CodeGreenAfg, a youth-led initiative that provides educational resources and opportunities to Afghan girls, including distributing thousands of books and running outreach programs and has launched #BlackAndWhiteForHerRight, a global digital movement that uses her black-and-white school uniform as a symbol of solidarity with Afghan girls. She has been recognized with the Diana Award for her social impact work