Question to the Department for International Development:

To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, what estimate she has made of the (a) number of children of school age in Afghanistan, (b) proportion of such children who were not in education and (c) proportion of those not in education who were girls in (i) 2010 and (ii) 2017.

In 2017, official figures show that UK support has helped more than 6.4m children attend school in Afghanistan, 38% of whom are girls. This is up from around 4 million children in 2009/2010, over a third of whom were girls. Figures on the number of children out of school are hard to verify, but the UN estimates the figures to be between 6-7 million over the past few years. A breakdown by gender is not available.