The plight of girls under the Taliban
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 29 November 2021
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In Afghanistan, high schools are currently closed to girls, and women have been banned from TV dramas. So how hard is life for the female half of the population, as the Taliban reassert control?
Tamasin Ford hears from her colleague Yalda Hakim, who recently returned to the Afghan capital Kabul, the city of her birth, where she quizzed members of the new regime about their intentions for girls' education. Tamasin also speaks to Mahbouba Seraj of the Afghan Women Skills Development Center in Kabul about what life is now like in the city.
Meanwhile Marianne O’Grady, who worked in Afghanistan for the charity CARE International until she was evacuated in August, says that with food now running desperately short in the country, there are even more pressing concerns than the treatment of women.
(Picture: Afghan girls look out next to a building in Sharan, Afghanistan; Credit: Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Tamerson Ford. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:05.0 | Three months on from the Taliban takeover, the situation in Afghanistan is rapidly deteriorating. |
| 0:12.0 | Yes, the country was poor. Yes, the situation in the remote parts of Afghanistan was dire, but never this desperate, never all over the streets of Kabul. |
| 0:23.0 | Most high school girls still remain locked out of the classroom. |
| 0:26.7 | Women have been banned from TV dramas, and few have been able to return to work. |
| 0:32.2 | You want to eradicate the faces of the woman from everything? |
| 0:36.0 | Is that what you want to do? |
| 0:37.3 | What is the meaning of it? |
| 0:38.9 | This is what we really want to know. In today's Business Daily from the BBC, we speak to women in |
| 0:44.5 | Afghanistan on their hopes and fears for a country set on eliminating their voices from the public sphere. |
| 0:55.6 | Life in Afghanistan is getting harder and harder every day. It's been three months |
| 1:01.3 | since the Taliban took control. The stark warning from the UN that more than half of the |
| 1:06.4 | population are marching towards starvation paints a picture of a fragile, desperate country crying out for help. |
| 1:13.9 | Reports of families selling their children to survive are heartbreaking. |
| 1:18.7 | I've been reporting from this country for the past 15 years. |
| 1:22.1 | I have never seen the situation in this country in terms of its poverty as bad as this in that time. |
| 1:30.3 | BBC presenter Yelda Hakim was born in Afghanistan. Her family fled in the 1980s during the Soviet |
| 1:37.2 | occupation. Last week, she went back for the first time since the Taliban seized power in August. |
| 1:44.6 | Yes, the country was poor. |
| 1:46.2 | Yes, the situation in some parts of the country, in the remote parts of Afghanistan, was dire. |
| 1:52.9 | But never this desperate, never all over the streets of Kabul. |
| 1:56.7 | No matter where you turn, there's someone desperate, you know, grabbing your arm, desperately asking you if you've got any connections with international aid agencies, if you can provide them even with a loaf of bread. |
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