What Went Wrong? Donor‐Driven Gender Interventions in Afghan Education and the Failure of Contextual Adaptation (2001–2021): A Critical Systematic Review

ABSTRACT

Between 2001 and 2021, international donors invested billions of dollars in gender‐in‐education programming in Afghanistan, yet the country remained among the worst globally for women’s rights and educational access. This article argues that this failure reflects a structural epistemological disconnect: a fundamental divergence between Western donor conceptualizations of gender and the Afghan‐Islamic context, where gender is governed by Islamic jurisprudence, customary codes, and a linguistic reality in which no direct Dari or Pashtu equivalent for “gender” exists. Drawing on critical development studies, Islamic institutionalization theory, and a Critical Interpretive Systematic Review of 65 studies (2002–2024), the article synthesizes evidence through three structural tensions: progress versus sustainability, access versus empowerment, and universal norms versus local legitimacy. It concludes that the paradigm shift from Women in Development (WID) to Gender and Development (GAD) was adopted rhetorically in Afghan policy without genuine contextual translation, and introduces two analytical tools, performative mainstreaming and legitimacy‐grounded mainstreaming , with direct implications for gender programming in fragile and conflict‐affected states.