The Haq Foundation
Past due

Education is not a gift.
It is a haq.

Haq (حق) is the Persian and Arabic word for a right. Not a favor, not charity: what every person is owed. We exist to make education one.

1,777 days since Afghanistan banned girls from school
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Schoolgirls at an open-air class in Bamozai, Paktya province, Afghanistan
Women study at microscopes in a biology class at Kabul University in the 1950s Before · free to learn
Women in burqas waiting in a street in Herat After · shut out

Representative archival images. Left: a biology class at Kabul University, 1950s. Right: Herat; photo by Marius Arnesen, CC BY-SA 2.0.

The only country on earth

Afghanistan is the only country in the world where girls are banned from secondary school. Since 2021, an entire generation has watched the classroom door close by decree: roughly 2.2 million girls shut out, by UNESCO's count, with more aging into the ban every year.

It is the sharpest edge of a wider wound. Around the world, some 250 million children and young people are out of school, priced out, displaced, or told to wait their turn. Everywhere it happens, the same quiet lie does the work: that education is something a child must be lucky enough to receive.

The ban did not arrive all at once. Secondary schools closed in 2021. Universities followed in 2022. In 2024 the last door left open, nursing and midwifery training, closed too. Each decree was narrower than the one before it, and each one took something that cannot simply be handed back later.

A year out of school is not a year paused. It is a year of forgetting what was already learned, of pressure to marry, of families quietly deciding that a girl who cannot study may as well work. The cost compounds long after the news has moved on.

So we are not waiting for the decree to lift. Waiting is the one thing none of these girls can afford, and every month spent on it is a month she does not get back.

We reject the lie at the root. Schooling is not luck. It is a haq, and a haq withheld is a debt. This foundation exists to collect.

2.2Mgirls barred from secondary school 4+ yearssince the classroom doors closed 2022women banned from university 250Mchildren out of school worldwide 2024women banned from nursing & midwifery training 1country on earth where the ban is law 0the acceptable number

They never stopped wanting to learn.

A young Afghan girl in a green scarf holds a pen, hands clasped over her mouth Primary age · still allowed

"I honestly feel like I've lost all hope. We have become so alone."

A Haq Foundation student in Afghanistan
A late-teen Afghan student in an orange headscarf studies at a laptop Secondary · banned since 2021

"For a long time now, it has felt as though the world has forgotten us. Sometimes it feels like we died a long time ago, and no one remembers us anymore."

A Haq Foundation student in Afghanistan
A young Afghan woman in a pale blue burqa at a shop doorway University · banned since 2022

"Our suffering continues every day, but it feels as though our voices can no longer reach anyone."

A Haq Foundation student in Afghanistan

So we get her out, and we put her through school.

The decree closed the buildings. It did not close the road out. We take a girl in Afghanistan and put her through whatever school comes next: high school, college, graduate school, as far as she wants to go. We find the programs that will take her, write the applications with her, chase down every dollar of scholarship, get her out of the country, and get her settled somewhere she can study. She never takes a step alone.

Where every dollar you give lands:

That number is still moving.

The counter at the top of this page has not stopped once while you read. For one girl, with one sponsorship, it can.

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