“When I arrived in Portugal, I felt that I was finally coming back to life after four long years in limbo.”
These are the words of a young Afghan woman. What restored her sense of being alive was nothing extraordinary. It was a classroom. After four years of forced confinement, she could once again sit in a class among her peers, learn, do homework and belong to a community where everyone had the right to an education. “In Afghanistan, education was how I survived,” she wrote. In Portugal, it became “my dream and my hope.”
Her story is one of freedom regained. But it is also a mirror image of what has happened to the millions of women and girls left behind.
August 15 marks five years since the Taliban took Kabul. Five years during which roughly half of Afghanistan’s population has been progressively pushed out of public life. Women have not disappeared. They are there. They think, work when they can, care for others, teach, learn, resist and dream. But they live with a terrible paradox: they make up half of society, yet they are becoming increasingly invisible.
Afghanistan is now the only country in the world where girls and women are barred from secondary and higher education. According to the latest UNESCO and UNICEF data, 2.4 million adolescent girls are being denied secondary education. And exclusion begins even earlier: 93% of children reaching the end of primary school have not attained basic
reading proficiency.
This is not merely an education crisis. It is a systematic attempt to deprive roughly half the population of the tools they need to assert themselves and build independent lives. Education is far more than a classroom or a diploma. It enables us to understand the world and find the words to question it, to know our rights and learn how to defend them. It opens the way to economic independence, participation in society and the possibility of choosing our own future. Without education, freedom becomes an empty shell.
But there is another story we need to tell. Afghan women and girls have not stopped wanting to learn. Many continue to do so quietly and in secret, using every means available: the internet, informal networks, learning communities and every opening through which knowledge can still pass. Learning itself has become a form of resistance.
The international community must continue to demand unequivocally that schools and universities reopen to women. The right to education is a human right and cannot be negotiated away. But five years on, condemnation is no longer enough. We cannot wait for the doors of Afghan universities to reopen before we begin to act. If one door has been closed, we must find ways to open others.
We are not starting from scratch. Around the world, several initiatives are working to keep education within reach of Afghan girls: online and distance learning, scholarships and mobility programmes, vocational training, digital resources, university networks, mentoring and the recognition of qualifications. There are also a great many education projects led by Afghan women themselves. None of these solutions can replace a girl’s right to walk freely into a school or university in her own country. But each can prevent one more life from being put on hold.
In Portugal, the Beacon of Hope (Farol de Esperança) programme has enabled young Afghan women to rebuild the academic paths that were interrupted. Some have now graduated from our higher education institutions in fields as varied as Political Science and International Relations, Psychology, Urban Planning and Engineering, and have already begun their professional careers. Others completed only a semester of Portuguese
language study, while the remaining students will finish their degrees in the next academic year. Two students deserve special mention for taking first place in an entrepreneurship competition with a technology project designed to monitor babies’ well-being.
The experience has also taught us that a scholarship, though a critical help, alone is not enough: language preparation, mentoring, integration and support in the transition from university to employment must also be provided.
But this kind of response has an obvious limitation: scale. A scholarship can change one life. We now need to ask how a woman whose right to study has been restored can help a hundred others reclaim that right. We must also reach those who cannot leave Afghanistan.
The challenge, then, is to extend the reach of these responses by mobilizing existing resources and one of the most valuable resources we have developed: the students and graduates themselves. Those who have had the opportunity to study can become teachers, mentors and role models for thousands of women who remain excluded from higher education.
Nexus 3.0 already hastwo new projects in the pipeline. The first is the Lighthouse Healing Hub, an online mental health platform designed to provide confidential, culturally appropriate psychological support. It will offer consultations in users’ own languages with Afghan professionals trained in Portugal, as well as coaching and workshops. Because surviving—or even managing to study—is not enough. Years of isolation, fear and lost autonomy leave deep scars. Education, mental health and the ability to imagine a future are all part of the same process of rebuilding. The second project is more ambitious still: what if we build a university without borders? It would be a digital initiative inspired by the University in Exile, which welcomed Jewish and European academics and intellectuals persecuted by the Nazis in the 1930s. Our higher education institutions could form a shared network, open to counterparts abroad, with each contributing courses, lecturers, tutoring, libraries, digital resources, academic supervision or certification. Companies, foundations and other partners would provide technology, mentoring, internships, scholarships, connectivity and an international dimension. Above all, the first women we helped educate could teach those who come next. A student becomes a graduate. A graduate becomes a teacher. And so a multiplier chain of opportunity is set in motion.
We would not be replacing Afghan universities, nor would we be accepting the Taliban’s ban as inevitable. We would be doing precisely the opposite: rejecting it. We would be affirming that no regime should have the power to decide where knowledge ends.
Nexus 3.0 is well placed to launch this initiative in Portugal: it already brings together higher education institutions, civil society organisations, companies and donors committed to creating educational opportunities. International links are also growing: Nexus 3.0 joined an ERASMUS advocacy programme to promote refugees’ access to higher education and, in 2026, like Brave Future, another Portuguese NGO focused on education, became a member of the Alliance for Education of Women in Afghanistan (AEWA), which seeks to strengthen educational pathways and cooperation for the benefit of Afghan women and girls.
An online University in Exile could begin with Afghan women, but it need not end with them. In the future, the same model could reach students of other nationalities whose right to learn has been taken away by war, persecution, forced displacement or discrimination. A university without borders for those whose access to knowledge has been taken away by borders.
Five years on, the young woman who found a classroom in Portugal says she dreams of a world in which everyone has “the opportunity to live as they should.” We cannot give her—or the millions of women who remain in Afghanistan—those five years back. But we can refuse to lose the next five.
The Taliban closed the universities to women. It is time we opened one they cannot close.
