After the Taliban banned Afghan women from working, the German government suspended funding for numerous development projects. Now the turnaround is taking place and money is flowing again. However, it is imperative that the projects help women and girls.
Germany will resume financing development projects in Afghanistan. This emerges from an internal letter from the development aid ministry, which is available to the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” (SZ). According to this, the Chancellery, the Development Ministry and the Foreign Ministry have discussed how the aid for Afghanistan should be dealt with in the future. Most of the projects financed by Germany were suspended at the end of December after the Taliban imposed a ban on women working in humanitarian organizations. Now help is to be financed again – albeit with a new condition: only projects that support women and girls will be continued.
The new guideline is “by women for women,” according to a letter from the Development Ministry to the organizations responsible for handling the projects. The ministry sees this as a mandatory criterion – projects from which women do not demonstrably benefit no longer receive any money. For this reason, around 15 percent of the projects funded to date are not reactivated.
When the financing was suspended at the end of last year, Development Minister Svenja Schulze said that the Taliban’s ban on women working was “an irresponsible blow to aid for the Afghan people”. Without women workers, many local organizations would not be able to operate. Therefore, the German support must be suspended.
In the meantime, the Taliban’s employment ban has been eased slightly, but overall the situation for women in Afghanistan has deteriorated massively in recent months: secondary schools for girls have been closed, and women are denied access to universities. They are only allowed to move through the country when accompanied by male relatives, and sport is also prohibited. Contraceptives are banned in some regions.
According to the SZ, the ministry justifies the fact that money is now being sent to Afghanistan again with the consideration that women and girls would be “double punished” if development policy commitments were also suspended in areas in which women are employed and could be achieved. In addition, experience from the first Taliban regime showed that the withdrawal of international support at the time worsened the human rights situation: “We shouldn’t repeat this mistake.” In addition, it is said, the current humanitarian crisis in the country cannot be overcome in the medium term without additional development projects.
When the Taliban took power in Afghanistan again in August 2021, Germany began to focus its activities in the country on projects that focus on girls and women. However, this orientation was not a mandatory prerequisite for financing at the time. However, it explains why the proportion of projects that do not now meet the conditions for resuming funding is comparatively low.
