UN Agencies Say 53% of Afghan Primary-Age Children Are Outside Formal School

A joint United Nations education assessment says 53% of primary-school-age children in Afghanistan remain outside formal general education, even as families seek more schooling and the school-age population grows. The finding was released by UNESCO and UNICEF on 4 November 2026 and concerns access to formal general education; it is not a count of children receiving no learning of any kind.

The agencies say more than 2.6 million Afghan girls have been denied secondary education since 2021 under restrictions imposed by the country's de facto authorities. Roughly 5,300 community-based classes served 162,000 learners by October 2026, 64% of them girls, but the agencies say these alternatives cannot replace regular in-person secondary schooling.

The report also identifies an access-versus-quality problem. Around 6.6 million children attended public primary schools in 2025, approximately 560,000 more than in 2022. Yet Afghanistan's population aged seven to 18 grew from about 10.4 million in 2019 to 11.5 million in 2024, and enrolment has not kept pace with the demand for places. The 53% estimate concerns formal general education, so it should not be used to calculate a definitive number of children receiving no instruction without examining the underlying survey coverage and alternative-school categories.

Learning outcomes are weak even for many children who attend. In a national assessment of more than 55,000 fourth-grade pupils across all 34 provinces, fewer than half met the minimum third-grade language standard and only about one in four met the corresponding mathematics standard, according to the UN agencies.

The report describes additional pressure from population movement: by September 2026, approximately 1.23 million Afghans had returned during the year, including more than 245,000 children needing education support. University enrolment was about 208,000 in 2026, up from 189,000 in 2024 but far below the roughly 430,000 recorded in 2020.

Afghan independent outlet KabulNow separately reported the release and its principal figures on 5 November. Its account and the UNICEF announcement describe the same joint UN study; they should not be treated as two independent surveys. The assessment identifies restrictions on girls' education, insufficient investment, displacement and learning-quality gaps as major constraints. It does not by itself establish how much of the shortfall is attributable to any one factor or that every affected child has no alternative learning.

The next accountability questions concern the education authorities' current policy response, school-capacity budgets, province-level enrolment trends, the methods behind the formal-school exclusion estimate and whether the promised expansion of community learning reaches children who remain excluded. TFNOS has not independently obtained a response from Afghanistan's de facto education ministry to the new findings.