The Economics of Exclusion
What It Costs the World When Women & Girls Are Denied the Chance to Learn & Earn by Emilie Saunders
Badakhshan, Afghanistan
The cow arrived in the autumn of 2025. By any conventional measure, it was a modest investment: one dairy cow and her calf, delivered to a farming family in Farhad, a remote village tucked high in the mountains of Badakhshan, Afghanistan. The family had seven children and a failing harvest. Rain had become unpredictable, then scarce, and a household whose livelihood depended entirely on the land watched as that land yielded less with every passing season. Their daughter, Husna, was 20 years old. Months earlier, the accelerated learning program she joined to make up for years of missed schooling had been shuttered. She continued anyway. Alone at home, she studied with whatever materials she could find. No teacher. No classmates. No clear reason to believe her efforts would ever lead anywhere. Then came the cow. What happened next is what economists call human capital formation.
The rest of us might simply call it determination.
2026-2027 JOURNEY OF HOPE | 7