When the Taliban suddenly shut nursing and midwifery schools across Afghanistan this month, a handful of students in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif removed their white coats and set them alight in protest.
“I saw every single dream of mine go up in flames,” said trainee nurse Maary Mohibian as she recalled watching her friends burn their uniforms.
Angry students said the closures had abruptly left thousands of girls without a future and would have serious implications for women’s healthcare in a country that has some of the world’s highest maternal and infant mortality rates.
Many trainees were just a day or two away from their final exams and had spent up to 75,000 afghani (€1,000) on their courses, according to interviews with more than 15 students at different private nursing and midwifery institutes.
Since seizing power in 2021, the Taliban have barred women from university and most jobs, and imposed tight restrictions on their lives, increasingly confining them to their homes.
Nursing and midwifery courses were seen as one of the few ways left for women to continue their education and earn a living.
Mohibian (24) had banked on working as a nurse in order to help her family as they struggled with household expenses.
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“My only hope was to finish my course and get a job. I don’t know how long we can survive,” she said.
Nursing and midwifery courses cost about 20,000 afghani a year, but new graduates start on 10,000 afghani a month, rising to 15,000 as they gain experience – higher than the average wage.
Most students said they had used their savings or family savings to pay for their courses. Some had sold their gold jewellery – a common way for women to hold and pass on wealth in Afghanistan.
One student said her friend – a widow with two children – had sold all her gold to pay for her nursing course so she could have a secure future. When their school shut, she cut her wrists in despair.
“This shows how devastating the impact of this decision is on our lives,” said the friend, whose name we have withheld to protect both women.
The Taliban has not officially announced or explained the closures, but government spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid confirmed the institutes had shut.
Students said members of the Taliban’s morality police force, who enforced the closures on December 2nd, told them the schools were empowering women who should be at home and that some were not wearing the correct hijab.
Trainee midwife Pardis Mohamadi was about to take her final exams in the northern province of Baghlan when her school shut.
She had already begun a placement at a clinic where she had received a job offer dependent on her exams. “When I wore my white coat it gave me confidence,” Mohamadi said. “People respected me and I could see how my job was saving mothers and children’s lives.”
With no qualification, she is now stuck at home. “Sometimes I go to the rooftop of my house and want to jump. I don’t see any future for myself,” she said.
Aid agencies and human rights groups have condemned the closures, saying Afghanistan has huge medical needs and is already desperately short of health workers.
The groups said the move would have grave consequences for the future of women’s healthcare, especially as women cannot be treated by male medical staff in most regions.
Afghanistan needs an extra 18,000 midwives, according to a 2021 report by the UN reproductive health agency UNFPA.
But health ministry spokesman Sharafat Zaman Amar denied any shortage, saying the country had 100,000 nurses, midwives and healthcare assistants.
However, Mohamadi said women often travelled miles to visit health services, as many rural clinics had shut after international funding dried up following the Taliban’s takeover.
For Mohamadi it was the second time the Taliban had crushed her aspirations. She had just got into medical school when the Taliban took power in 2021, ending her hopes of becoming a gynaecologist.
Her mother, a seamstress, used her savings to pay for Mohamadi’s two-year midwifery course, hoping her daughter would have a different future than what she had had.
Mohamadi said students had challenged the morality police as they shut her institute.
“One of my classmates asked them ‘Don’t you have a wife or daughter? Where will you take them if there is no midwife in the country?’ They said, ‘We can survive without you. Your job is in the home, not outside’.”
In the capital, Kabul, student nurse Weeda Rostama said she had enrolled in a nursing course partly to avoid forced marriage.
Like many girls shut out of education, she had come under increasing pressure from her family to get wed “as there was nothing else left for me”.
The 22-year-old said the morality police told students last week that women were not wearing proper hijabs and were “a danger to society”.
When she asked them to point to one woman who was not covered head to toe, they became aggressive.
Like Mohamadi, student nurse Marwa Azimi was also preparing for her final exams when her school shut in Badakhshan province, in the northeast.
Azimi, whose mother is a gynaecologist, had wanted to become a doctor, but opted for nursing when the Taliban closed universities to women.
“Right now, I feel I spent my money, energy and time in vain,” she said, adding that her home now felt “like a jail cell”.
But Azimi (19) is determined not to let the Taliban dictate her future and hopes to get a scholarship to study medicine abroad.
“I won’t give up just because they close the doors here,” she said. “I will pursue my dreams.” – Thomson Reuters Foundation
