ISLAMABAD: Nine in ten Afghan men own a national identity card. Fewer than four in ten women do.
That gap determines who can own land, see a doctor, send children to school, and claim what a father left behind. In Afghanistan, all of it comes down to a single document called a Tazkira.
Without one, none of it is legally possible.
The Statelessness Encyclopedia Asia Pacific, published by the organization Nationality For All in August 2025, put the disparity plainly: roughly 90% of men hold a Tazkira, compared to about 40% of women. The gap is worst in rural and conservative areas, where cultural norms and restricted mobility place the document further out of reach for women than almost anywhere else.
Afghanistan's government has made measurable progress on issuance. Its National Statistics and Information Authority has distributed approximately 17.1 million electronic ID cards since the program launched in 2018, according to an official NSIA statement on Dec. 29, 2025. But the distribution tells its own story: 10.6 million of those cards went to men. 6.4 million went to women.
Against a national population exceeding 40 million, the numbers leave a significant portion of the country unregistered. A December 2025 UNHCR protection monitoring report found that 50% of surveyed households had at least one member with no documentation at all. Women and children recorded the highest rates of exclusion.
An earlier UNHCR household assessment from May 2024 put the share of affected households at 55% nationally. This rose to 77% in Uruzgan and Hilmand provinces.
The barriers keeping women from the system are not incidental, they are structural. Afghanistan's 2024 Law on the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice reinforced the requirement for women to be accompanied by a male guardian to travel.
That requirement directly obstructs visits to ID distribution centers, particularly for widows and female-headed households who have no male relative available. Government offices are predominantly staffed by men, adding another layer of practical difficulty for women seeking to apply.
Then there is the cost. The fee for an electronic Tazkira was raised fivefold, from 100 Afghani to 500 Afghani. This follows a Taliban cabinet directive in April 2023, according to NRC's March 2026 briefing.
Replacements and corrections now carry a fee of 1,000 Afghani. For families among Afghanistan's 22 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, those amounts force a calculation: which family members get documented, and which do not.
UN Women reported in August 2025 that 76% of Afghan women face disparities in financial and social inclusion. The documentation gap sits at the root of much of that exclusion — blocking access to employment, banking, and legal services simultaneously.
The consequences are not abstract. Without a tazkira, a woman returning home after years of displacement has no legal standing to reclaim property. Land taken by others cannot be contested. Inheritance cannot be asserted.
NRC's March 2026 briefing describes families arriving back in Afghanistan to find their homes occupied and no legal avenue available to them.
The 2025 return wave made all of this more acute. More than 2 million Afghans came back from neighboring countries during the year, many arriving without any paperwork. The agency described the situation as having reached a critical level. The women returning without documents are entering a country where the women who never left are already, on paper, largely invisible.
