Date of Award

Summer 2026

Language

English

Embargo Period

8-18-2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College/School/Department

Department of Educational Policy and Leadership

Program

Educational Policy and Leadership

First Advisor

Aaron Benavot

Committee Members

Gilbert A. Valverde, Jordan Naidoo

Keywords

Education, Educational Policy, Educational History, Girls Education in Afghanistan, Comparative Education, Educational Access, Public Schools, Educational Equality, Gender-based equality

Subject Categories

Educational Leadership | Elementary and Middle and Secondary Education Administration | Elementary Education | International and Comparative Education | Secondary Education

Abstract

This dissertation examines the persistence and spatial concentration of gender-based educational inequality in Afghanistan's public school system from 2002 to 2021–– a period spanning post-2001 reconstruction, the expansion of the Republic era, and the reversal under the second Taliban regime. Despite substantial international investment and two decades of repeated commitments to gender parity, access to and progression through public schooling remained profoundly uneven across the country’s thirty-four provinces. The Gender Parity Index values differ sharply between provinces, and those with the lowest overall enrollment tend to exhibit the widest gender gaps. Existing scholarship has concentrated on the national level, obscuring subnational variations and favoring description over explanation; as a result, the most data-rich period in Afghan educational history remains comparatively underexamined.

The inquiry is organized around three research questions: how gender-based educational inequalities have evolved across successive political regimes, how shifts in state policy have shaped those trajectories, and what the extent and internal structure of provincial variation were during the Republic period. It further asks which political, ideological, and institutional factors best explain the persistence—and in some cases the widening—of provincial disparities, particularly among provinces with similar structural conditions. An explanatory sequential mixed-methods design pairs with provincial-level quantitative analysis with qualitative interpretation. Four provincial factors—literacy, child marriage prevalence, international education assistance, and conflict intensity—are tested through correlation and regression against girls' gross enrollment ratios, while political and institutional dynamics are examined through document and content analysis of Republic- and Taliban-era materials. The analytical framework draws together the universal right to education, state-centered theories of education and social transformation, and the literature on ideological and authoritarian control.

The quantitative findings show that the socio-economic factors conventionally invoked to explain educational disparity account for only part of the provincial variation: female literacy is a significant correlate only at the secondary level, child marriage prevalence shows no measurable provincial association, and international assistance is weak and inconsistent despite its scale. Conflict intensity emerges as the strongest correlate, yet the association alone cannot establish its mechanism or explain why provinces of comparable intensity diverged. These limits redirect the analysis toward political and institutional factors. The qualitative analysis argues that educational access was territorialized—governed more by the geography of political authority than by administrative boundaries or development indicators—and that even where the state held control, inequality persisted through institutional design: a reliance on national aggregate targets that masked concentrated provincial exclusion, the belated introduction of targeted equity measures only after the Republic's most favorable decade had passed, and a recurring gap between the recognition of disparity in national strategies and its systematic implementation.

This dissertation offers the first longitudinal, provincially disaggregated, and regime-comparative account of gender-based educational inequality in Afghanistan's public schooling system, demonstrating empirically that this inequality is spatially concentrated and cumulative rather than uniform. Because the evidence is provincial-level and correlational and documentary, the study identifies the patterns and mechanisms most consistent with the data rather than asserting a definitive causal hierarchy. Theoretically, it tests state-centered and rights-based frameworks in a setting where the dominant pressures on education are ideological and geopolitical rather than principally economic. Methodologically, it integrates provincial-scale statistical analysis with qualitative interpretation; bridging two approaches the literature has typically kept apart. Practically, the studyreframes a debate that has turned on technical and rhetorical claims by grounding it in disaggregated, mechanism-level evidence. Because it identifies not only where exclusion concentrated but through which institutional and political mechanisms it was produced, it offers the provincial diagnosis on which any credible reconstruction of Afghan education––one able to reach the places and confront the conditions that earlier expanding did not––will need to build.

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This work is licensed under the University at Albany Standard Author Agreement.

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