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The last door closed: the Taliban's December 2024 ban on medical training for women, and what it means for a listed medical faculty in Jalalabad
Rokhan Institute of Higher Education in Jalalabad, Nangarhar province, is a private institution whose Faculty of Medicine is listed in the World Directory of Medical Schools. Its page draws steady searches on this site. What those searches cannot show is that, since December 2024, half of the population that faculty exists to train is barred from entering it.
According to Human Rights Watch, in early December 2024 the Taliban closed one of the last remaining routes to education for Afghan women by forbidding them from attending institutions offering medical education. The directive from the Taliban leader, issued through the Ministry of Public Health, closed medical institutes to women, ending their access to training as doctors, nurses, midwives, laboratory technicians and other clinical roles, in public and private institutions alike. UN News reported the United Nations' condemnation of the ban; the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights recorded UN experts calling it "totally unjustifiable". The consequence the same bodies stressed is medical as well as educational: in Afghanistan only female health workers may treat women and girls, so a ban on training women is, in time, a ban on treating them.
Two years earlier, in December 2022, students of Nangarhar University's medical faculty had refused to sit exams in protest at the ban on women attending universities, a moment reported at the time by KabulNow. The December 2024 order removed the exception under which medical institutes had continued to admit women after that.
Nobody at Rokhan is accused of anything. The institute operates under a government whose rules it does not set. The case is here because a directory listing is silent about who may study, and because the market for Afghan medical seats abroad, especially among families in the region looking for low-cost English-medium courses, has not stopped. A woman offered a place at any Afghan medical institute today is being offered something the state does not permit her to take up; a man offered one is being offered a degree from a system whose international recognition is, at best, uncertain and whose clinical training now excludes half the patients.
Verify with your home regulator whether an Afghan MBBS is accepted at all, and do not pay an intermediary for a seat that the law of the country may not let you fill.
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This is a news-sourced case summary written by the TrustMBBS team, not a first-person account; see the sources above. They reflect one person's experience and are not a verdict on any institution. Report your own: Report a scam or tell your story.