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Pay Afghan Teachers and Healthcare Workers

Dear friend,

We just got this urgent request from friends in Afghanistan, who are women teachers and healthcare workers. They say the Taliban are allowing girls to attend primary school (grades 1-6). They have still not opened grades 7-12 to girls but have pledged to do so. The Afghan women teachers are calling on the Taliban to fulfill their promise to open all grades to girls. 

But our friends cite another major hurdle for educating Afghan girls: the non-payment of salaries to teachers. “Teachers have not been paid for the past three months and the Ministry of Education has very few resources,” they wrote. “There are currently more than 120,000 female teachers in public schools across the country, and about half of them are the sole source of income for their families. It is very difficult, even impossible, to ask these teachers to continue teaching without pay. We call on the international community, the World Bank, and other donors to help us fund the payment of Afghan teachers’ salaries in order to provide quality education to boys and girls, which is one of their fundamental rights.”

Join us in calling on the Biden Administration and key members of Congress to unfreeze the Afghan funds to pay the salaries of Afghan teachers and healthcare workers. 

The same crisis faces healthcare workers. There are over 13,000 female healthcare workers, including doctors, midwives, nurses, vaccinators, and other female staff. Most of them were being paid through the World Bank via the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF), but since June, the funding stopped. Meanwhile, the health system is on the brink of collapse. There has been a surge in cases of measles and diarrhea; a resurgence of polio is a major risk; almost half the children are malnourished; nearly 1 in 4 COVID hospitals have shuttered and 2 million doses of COVID19 vaccines remain unused for lack of personnel to administer them.

The most important thing we can do for Afghan women and girls right now is to call on the Biden Administration and key members of Congress to unfreeze the Afghan funds to pay teachers and healthcare workers. This money could come from the $9.4 billion of Afghan funds frozen in U.S. banks or from the World Bank reconstruction fund. The U.S. should use its leverage to get the World Bank funds released. 

Add your name to the petition calling to unfreeze the Afghan funds to pay teachers and healthcare workers.

The Afghan people, especially the women, should not be denied access to education or life-saving care. If these basic needs are not funded urgently, millions of Afghans will continue to suffer and there will be a huge wave of desperate refugees.

Afghan lives are in the balance. Let’s not abandon them. 

In solidarity, 
Medea Benjamin and the entire CODEPINK team

P.S. Wear your values. Check out CODEPINK's new t-shirts.


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  • Sophie Purdy
    commented 2022-09-22 11:14:50 -0400
    The Afghan government has had a long-standing policy of paying its teachers and healthcare workers in cash, rather than using electronic payments. Go to this https://sanjose.granicusideas.com/ideas/are-you-looking-for-an-affordable-and-skilled-dentist-in-downtown-calgary for more ideas. According to the Ministry of Education, there are currently about 350,000 teachers in Afghanistan, but only about 52 percent of them are paid on time. This means that at least another two-thirds are not being paid at all.
  • Roger Calven
    commented 2021-10-10 14:16:54 -0400
    Administrators, especially those daily nurturing their young constituents, require funds for transportation, food, and supplies.
    Those signers of the sanctions, and the withholding of funds rightly belonging to recipients, never go without food, medical care, or sharp pencils.
    Surely the better angles inside persons with erasers on their pencils have not joined with the fallen angles.
    Surely persons enjoying the beauty of life can erase the the wrongs that prevent the joy of living – and insure those envisioning lush field where barren landscapes now exist, will dig in and seed the future for the credit of our species happiness.