photo by The Afghan Times
For the International Day for the Elimination of Child Labour on June 12, 2025, we wrote that the persistence of child labour throughout the world is ultimately due to the institutionalized denial of these universal human rights by governments.
There is no greater moral, social and political failure than the refusal of governments to protect the rights of children; to bring an end to all forms of child labour; and to ensure that all children have unconditional access to free public education, along with their families’ access to affordable housing, adequate and nutritious food, and public health care. Taken together, these are fundamental, universal human rights that should ensure that everyone, everywhere can enjoy what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights describes as a life worthy of human dignity.
When looking at Afghanistan, this moral, social and political failure is multiplied several times over. As the international community continues to ignore the human rights abuses and repression by the Taliban, the rise in child labour is causing terrible hardship and suffering. The stories of children and their families reported here makes it painfully clear what is happening. And yet an entire generation of children not going to school – and all the girls who are denied access to education – means this is also about the future. Unless we act, this institutionalized denial could be perpetuated for generations. This is not an accidental outcome of irrational and oppressive policies. A generation without education, a generation without literacy, certainly serves a regime founded on ignorance and intolerance.
In Afghanistan under the Taliban, this institutionalized denial of human rights extends to the exclusion of women from work and public life. This not only impoverishes families by denying incomes previously earned by women but compels children to work to replace the incomes that women are no longer able to earn. This is further exacerbated by the ban on education for women and girls. As several of these stories explain, once the Taliban banned girls from attending school beyond sixth grade, there was nothing left for girls but to work.
It is in this sense that institutionalized denial drives child labour in Afghanistan today. Women are denied the right to work and engage in economic activities in public; girls are denied the right to education; and entire families are denied the right to their livelihoods as they face economic hardship and poverty. It is this institutionalized denial of human rights that is forcing children to engage in child labour, not poverty.
Yet the Taliban is already using the food security crisis, increased poverty, and the massive increase in child labour to seek international aid and technical cooperation with UN agencies and foreign governments. Our moral, social and political failure will be compounded even further if UN agencies and foreign governments provide such international aid and technical cooperation. This would only serve to give the Taliban recognition as a government and allow it to establish its legitimacy – a legitimacy it does not currently have.
No amount of international aid and technical cooperation can address poverty and child labour as long as its fundamental cause – the ban on the right of women to work and engage in economic activities in the public domain, and the ban on the right of women and girls to education. Unless these bans are lifted and the human rights of women and girls are institutionalized, then the institutionalized denial of human rights will continue to drive an increase in child labour. The stories of children’s hardship and suffering reported here in these pages will be multiplied over and over in the coming months and years. As will our shame for failing the children of Afghanistan.
See Child Labour in Taliban’s Afghanistan – a new report by women journalists of The Afghan Times [June 1, 2025]
To read the new report by The Afghan Times please click here [PDF 220MB]
