Keeping Women Barefoot, Pregnant and Out of Nonprofits

May 6, 2024

The Taliban’s ban on women in public life, and especially while working at nonprofits, continues to impact the operation of civil society in what is probably one of the neediest places on earth right now. If it’s impolite to criticize someone’s religion than just tell everybody I ain’t got no manners. Because the religious beliefs that cause the Taliban to ban women from working in civil society must be the damned dumbest I’ve ever heard. That’s right. Excuse my own stereotyping but women are better about care and nurture than men, and yet these sage elders with guns expect that God would have women stay home. Instead of out in the world caring and nurturing, while also trying cases, flying planes, fixing computers, serving as judges, senators and vice-presidents, running corporations and universities, and then picking up kids from daycare, getting them fed and into bed before responding to emails at midnight? I have four daughters, I ain’t got time to be polite. It’s a stupid evil belief.

Anyway, the United Nations has a useful website that reports on human rights around the world. It recently issued the seventh of eight updates on the impact of the ban on women working at NGOs. You can access the rest of some very busy graphs via the report. Here are some of the conclusions:

The Gender in Humanitarian Action (GiHA) Working Group and the Humanitarian Access Group (HAG) undertook a seventh round of the survey aiming to capture operational trends following the 24 December 2022 directive barring Afghan women humanitarian workers, employed by national and international NGOs, and its extension to the United Nations women staff since 04 April 2023. The data collection took place during the month of March 2024. Tenth months on from the first ban on women aid workers, these were the key findings from this snapshot, emerging from 127 respondents surveyed across NGOs, INGOs and UN agencies:

The impact of these various impediments thus continues to be on women’s meaningful participation in the response, both as staff and as beneficiaries of assistance.

More respondents than ever mention that working from home has impacted their women staff’s ability to interact with other team members (mentioned by 66% of respondents). On the other hand, looking at women beneficiaries of assistance, the first impact seen by organizations is on affected women’s ability to provide feedback and participate in decision making on the humanitarian response (mentioned by 54% of respondents this round), while 46% continue the mention that the impact of assistance on women and girls cannot be monitored.
The survey findings show that to mitigate the impact on women and girls, more partners are adapting their project modalities to reach women. For instance, more than half have segregated their distribution spaces for women and men while 52% are paying mahram costs to their women staff. 34% of partners are also using women community volunteers compared to 23% in the last round, showing a positive trend in thinking and implementing gender-responsive project adaptations.
78% of women led organizations have received funding compared to 62% in October, which may be showing the positive impact of the new financial year and of ongoing efforts by donors to fund these organizations.
50% of respondent organizations mentioned that they had been able to secure authorizations allowing their Afghan women staff to report to the field, and 35% mentioned exemptions for women to report to the office, a continuous increase since July 2023 respectively. However, advocacy at the national level to protect the operational space and ensure the safety and security of women participating in humanitarian activities remains a priority.
37% of respondents reported being able to fully use the national exemptions on health and education, while 33% of respondents were only able to apply it partially and with conditionalities. 15% of the respondents said they could not use it since the latest restriction on soft health activities (November 2023 directive from df MoPH).
For partners who continued to operate with women, the conditions and orders for operations included a strong increase in the requirements for mahram (46%) and involvement of community leaders (37%) in negotiations. Monitoring visits by the DfA (15%) increased, reaching a comparable interference to July 2023. The involvement in procurement and staff selection (4%)

darryll k. jones