The Human Cost of the Taliban's Corruption and Kleptocracy

• The United States and United Nations member states must collaboratively enforce harsher penalties on Taliban leaders responsible for Afghanistan’s gender apartheid and other human rights abuses.

• The U.N. and national governments should formally expand the definition of apartheid to include gender-based discrimination and segregation.

• Governments, intergovernmental organizations, and philanthropic foundations should increase support for women-led organizations in Afghanistan.

• Governments and intergovernmental organizations must include a wider range of Afghan stakeholders in all convenings, hearings, and negotiations focusing on the future of Afghanistan.

• These opportunities include, but should not be limited to, congressional and parliamentary hearings, regional and ministerial summits, and U.N.-hosted forums.

• Media and philanthropic organizations should support Afghan-led civil society initiatives that address information gaps and collect data on women and girls.

The U.N. launched the largest ever aid appeal in support of a single country in 2021 in response to the dire situation in Afghanistan, labeled the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.

Around US$80 million arrives in Afghanistan every 10-14 days via humanitarian cash shipments in an effort to infuse essential economic liquidity and critical support for the Afghan people. These funds are deposited into a private bank, where U.N. agencies and partners can access the resources to pay for necessary expenditures.

Additionally, other funding streams supporting everything from local to international nongovernmental organizations flow into the country to pay for staff, goods, and other needed services by way of more informal financial infrastructure. These informal channels include cryptocurrency and Hawala, a traditional money-transfer system used in the Muslim world that involves payment to an agent who then coordinates with a remote associate to pay the final recipient.

From heating and housing to food assistance and medical care, these resources literally keep Afghan families alive. But for the Taliban, these resources have also become a means to fortify power and prosperity. Humanitarian assistance is increasingly being used as a means of funding for Taliban members and loyalists, as documented by an increasing number of independent reports, including from SIGAR and Zan Times.

“The Taliban appear to view the U.N. system as yet another revenue stream, one which their movement will seek to monopolize and centralize control over,” the U.S. Institute for Peace (USIP) noted in a July 2023 analysis on the Taliban’s manipulation of foreign aid.

Taliban members have found a wide variety of ways to divert cash and humanitarian supplies. This has allowed them to influence local distribution networks, reward supporters, establish shadow nongovernmental organizations, and even commandeer critical supplies already distributed to needy community members, as detailed in the first paper of this series.

Overall, aid access for women remains a huge concern, especially as most aid dollars flow through the U.N. system: “According to multiple U.N. officials across different agencies, the Taliban have effectively infiltrated and influenced most U.N.-managed assistance programming,” according to the July 2023 SIGAR report to Congress. This has become the “main barrier” to assistance access for highly vulnerable beneficiaries.

As SIGAR’s Sopko testified before House Foreign Affairs Committee in November 2023, “Taliban officials routinely pressure U.S. partners to hire Taliban allies, insist that U.S. partners contract with Taliban-affiliated companies, dictate which Afghans should receive U.S. aid, demand payoffs from U.S. partners before a project can begin, divert U.S. food aid to Taliban soldiers, and tax recipients of aid once it is delivered.”

Those most in need of assistance are deplorably left without access, a double blow when coupled with the regime’s institution of gender apartheid.

“The only way women can survive is via aid, and yet the Taliban are stealing one of the only lifelines that remains to keep women and children alive.”
– Zahra Nader
Journalist and founder of  Zan Times

Taliban harassment, intimidation, arbitrary detentions, and acts of violence against aid workers have steadily increased since 2021, capped by outright bans on Afghan women from working for nongovernmental organizations and U.N. agencies in December 2022 and March 2023. These edicts bar more than half the population from accessing one of the only remaining means to support themselves and their children.

“The de facto authorities have been routinely interfering in humanitarian operations by requesting excessive information on humanitarian workers and beneficiaries and restricting their activities in ways that are contrary to humanitarian principles,” according to a letter from U.N. experts in December 2022 condemning the Taliban’s interference in critically needed humanitarian resources. “The barring of women employees is the last straw, and a unified response is required,” noted the special rapporteurs, independent experts, and working groups that presented the letter.

About 93% of organizations were unable to access women in need of support following the January 2023 ban on female nongovernmental organization employees, a UN Women survey examining aid access showed.

The Taliban’s exploitation and gender apartheid policies have caused many nonprofits to cease operations completely over the past year. Those who remain are often forced to pay high taxes and/or contribute toward other kickbacks (like cars) that wholly benefit the Taliban.

Meanwhile, families go without food, fuel, and other basic necessities as women’s needs and experiences are ignored and undermined by the Taliban’s exploitation of humanitarian assistance and the group’s actions to stifle the nonprofit sector.

Food aid reserves received under the previous Afghan government – like grain from India – were redirected by the Taliban when they took power, as a means of payment for public sector employees via a “food for work” program. Priority for participation in many cases goes to existing Taliban supporters.

Aid workers have documented parallel instances of corruption across diverse provinces, though much of the direct interference with humanitarian assistance has occurred in local capacities. Patterns of intimidation and abuse by Taliban members for the purposes of pilfering humanitarian assistance for personal gain and influence have repeatedly been documented in dozens of interviews by Zan Times with local citizens across eight Afghan provinces.

“The Taliban continue to manipulate the situation.”
– Habib Khan
Journalist and Founder of Afghan Peace Watch

The Zan Times investigation included examples of Taliban members removing previously distributed aid packages from the homes of those who received them. Taliban interference through the mandated addition of households (often loyalists) on pre-vetted aid distribution lists – despite many of these obligatory additions failing to meet need criteria – has also been widely documented. Examples of this type of aid abuse were provided in direct discussions with nonprofits by the author as well as documented in recent analysis by SIGAR, Zan Times, and others.

“If we refuse to comply, employees are threatened, detained, and even beaten on baseless charges,” one aid worker reflected on NPR.

For ethnic minorities like the Hazara, seizures of essential resources by the Taliban have also included housing, resulting in the forceful eviction and displacement of hundreds of families.

The Taliban are quite literally stealing food, cash, shelter, and other desperately needed essentials from the vulnerable Afghans who need them most. The clear priority for Taliban members at all levels of the regime’s hierarchy is the preservation and expansion of status rather than the preservation of life.

“The Taliban have one policy, and that is to say ‘no’ to women,” Zahra Joya, Rukhshana Media founder and a gender equity activist, told the author.

The international community must remember that women and children are victimized further every time the Taliban prevent an aid dollar from reaching intended beneficiaries.

This trend has only grown with the passage of time and the shift of global attention elsewhere. Between January and May 2023, the Taliban’s intrusion in the work of nongovernmental organizations operating in country contributed to “a steady decline in humanitarian access.” This includes a 32% increase in “incidents,” compared with the same timeframe in 2022, according to the July 2023 SIGAR report.

Meanwhile, levels of hunger are so grave that desperate women are forced into begging on the streets and outside bakeries, selling their children and/or organs, and other forms of exploitation, according to reports from multiple media outlets including The Guardian, NPR, and Rukhshana.

The economic hardship resulting from most women’s inability to work outside the home or access humanitarian aid has caused many families to face an unimaginable decision: whether to send their children to labor under unsafe conditions in coal mines, garbage dumps, brick factories, and street markets or at other physically intensive jobs. Child labor and other forms of exploitation have been a longstanding concern in Afghanistan, but current economic challenges and the inaccessibility of humanitarian assistance along with record levels of poverty and food insecurity have exacerbated the practice.

One in four children reported being asked to work outside the home to support their families in a Save the Children survey published in September 2022. It also showed that only 3% of families were able to meet basic needs. Well over a million Afghan children are currently engaged in some form of child labor in Afghanistan, both Save the Children and UNICEF estimates reveal.

Like other superficial promises, the Taliban previously expressed a desire to eliminate child labor, but current data show the opposite has actually occurred. For example, take the coal sector, where a small-statured child can more easily maneuver tunnels and other small spaces than an adult. The Taliban benefit from this as demand is growing both internally and from neighboring countries like China, Iran, and Pakistan. Most of the children navigating these dark, narrow mine shafts work 10 hours a day or more, contributing to the 10,000 tons of coal that the Ministry of Mining and Petroleum reports are being exported daily, according to an NPR analysis.

The United Nations defines violence against women and girls as “any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual, or mental harm or suffering to women and girls, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life. Violence against women and girls encompasses, but is not limited to, physical, sexual, and psychological violence occurring in the family or within the general community and perpetrated or condoned by the state.”

Violence against women and girls, long endemic in Afghanistan, has worsened significantly because of Taliban corruption and kleptocracy.

Talibs across all levels of the regime’s hierarchy are eagerly spending money on bride prices to acquire wives. Women are a marker of status and authority for the Taliban and many other ideological groups built on corruption and patriarchy.

Though a December 2021 decree by the Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, gave the perception that forced marriage was outlawed, risk of early marriages has jumped significantly in the country over the last two years.

The fact that corrupt Taliban members can afford to spend significant sums on acquiring wives has created the ironic dynamic of causing bride prices to climb, according to Dr. Valerie Hudson, author and Professor of Political Science at Texas A&M University’s Bush School of Government and Public Service. This Neanderthal practice of essentially “buying women” increases financial pressures on other men in society (especially lower-level Taliban fighters) who want a wife, further incentivizing corruption and human rights abuses.

“You give legitimacy by what you can give these men…. When you are not able to do so, you lose power.”
– Valerie Hudson
Author and Professor of Political Science at Texas A&M University’s Bush School of Government and Public Service

The Taliban’s acquisition of wives – often through force and the manipulation of a family’s desperation – is also leveraged to collect on debts or bolster support from loyalists. A Wall Street Journal examination of the Taliban’s use of forced marriage described the current reality as often amounting “to kidnapping and rape.”

Unable to feed their families or access lifesaving humanitarian assistance because of corruption, distraught parents have even made the agonizing choice of selling their children (mostly their daughters, infants, and unborn babies) in an attempt to ward off starvation and repay debts. As Hudson described bluntly, “the minute there becomes food insecurity, your daughter becomes a commodity.”

With few education and employment prospects available to young women and adolescent girls because of the Taliban’s gender apartheid, fearful families have also pursued forced marriage as a means to safeguard their daughters and sisters from Taliban acquisition. “During the previous government, when girls were attending schools and universities, the rate of forced marriages had decreased. Now they are rising again,” a former government prosecutor told The Guardian.

“Credible reports” of female children, some “as young as 20 days old” offered up for future marriage were documented by UNICEF shortly after the Taliban’s return to power in 2021. And Voice of America reported that “in the [first] eight months since the Taliban took control of the country, more than 120,000 children are feared to have been bartered for some sort of financial incentive, according to an analysis made by several aid agencies.”

Women and girls forced into marriage face significant risks to their health and well-being. These include, but aren’t limited to, sexual assault and exploitation; marital rape; forced labor and domestic servitude; human trafficking and other forms of gender-based violence; lack of choices and access to health and reproductive services; early pregnancy and pre- and postnatal complications; and mental health challenges.

“If you’re not going to school, you are going to be married.”
– Pashtana Durrani
Advocate and Founder, Learn Afghanistan

Perhaps the most vicious paradox in the horrifying treatment of women and girls in Afghanistan is the fact that the Taliban are spending significant resources on acquiring spouses as status symbols while forcing expectant mothers – including adolescent girls – to face the grave odds of surviving childbirth.

Furthermore, access to justice for gender-based violence survivors (including those coerced into early and forced marriage) has been essentially dismantled and replaced with an archaic interpretation of Sharia law that often rewards abusers. In the version of “justice” practiced by the corrupt and misogynistic Taliban, crimes against women are often tolerated and at times incentivized.

Women’s shelters and safe houses have been looted and seized by Taliban members for other purposes, and/or shuttered. Thousands of women – many survivors of horrific acts of domestic abuse – have seen their divorces nullified. Those who have remarried since their separation now live in fear of being punished for their second marriage, which the Taliban view as adultery, a crime punishable by stoning. Others have been forced back into the homes of their abusers, ordered to marry their rapists, lashed in public, or imprisoned for falsified crimes including “running away from home” and “prostitution.”

Many of these women and girls face additional threats of harassment, assault, arrest, and femicide, a vicious cycle of revictimization. Arrests of women attempting to flee gender-based violence have risen, according to multiple accounts from survivors, lawyers, and social workers published in the Washington Post in January 2023.

Two years into their current reign, the Taliban have demonstrated that they are incapable of governing.

While some influencers in the international sphere have given the Taliban credit for their swift ability to collect taxes and institute a façade of security and order, most of these actions have solely benefitted the regime and their loyalists rather than the Afghan people at large. As a result, essential government services and the populations who need them most have not only been ignored but intentionally undermined or exploited for personal gain by the Taliban.

Regardless of early promises for diversity and inclusion in government roles, the Taliban have been quick to reward those most loyal to their objectives with civil service employment and authority.

Before the Taliban’s return to power, women made up nearly 22% of the workforce, including 21% of the civil services, and 27% of the Afghan legislative body, above the global average, according to World Bank data.

But from September 2021, women faced bans or other significant gender barriers on most forms of employment. Qualified civil servants, administrators, and educators are being forcibly removed from their jobs and replaced by Taliban members, many of whom lack the education and expertise for the roles they have been assigned, reports regularly document.

Basic infrastructure remains grossly underfunded or misappropriated in favor of strengthening the Taliban’s wealth and control over society, despite the collection of billions of dollars in taxes, customs, and other revenues over the past two years. Communities in provinces throughout the country have seen a drastic rollback or complete closure of critical government services. This includes a realignment of priorities across many ministries, with an emphasis on propaganda, allegiance, and fear.

For example, the Taliban entirely dissolved the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, replacing it with the reestablished, ruthless Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice.

The Ministry of Martyrs and Disabled Affairs now prioritizes support for Taliban fighters, cutting or stopping payments for military widows and others who received it from the prior government, various accounts show.

Families of Taliban suicide bombers have been honored and compensated by leadership in highly publicized displays, while female-headed households are now among the most vulnerable populations in Afghanistan. Less than a year after the Taliban takeover, the World Food Program classified women-led homes as nearly “100% food insufficient,” with many also facing displacement.

Perhaps one of the most concerning examples of the Taliban’s abuse of country resources and its impact on women and children is the regime’s unrelenting assault on quality education access.

“Good government is health and education.”
– Sima Samar
Former Afghan Minister of Women’s Affairs

In addition to the outrageous ban on secondary and tertiary study for adolescent girls and young women in Afghanistan, the Taliban have made swift work of dismantling existing education infrastructure, including the widespread transition of secular schools into religious madrassas.

Teacher training centers have been dissolved. State funds have been appropriated for the expansion of Islamic education. And everything from public classrooms to privately owned companies have seen their property and assets commandeered for the expansion of the madrassa system.

The Taliban have replaced contemporary subjects including science, mathematics, social studies, and languages from the national curriculum, with instruction instead revised to “maintain and expand their ideological interests. This includes the stated goal of planting “seeds of hatred against Western countries … in students’ minds,” according to analysis from Hasht-e Subh and The Diplomat. None of this should be surprising, especially as the Taliban’s name itself is derived from the Pashto word for “knowledge seekers” or “students,” and madrassas have long been a staple of the Taliban’s strategy in proliferating their ideology, expanding their ranks, and establishing new generations of jihadis.

As during the Taliban’s rise to power in the 1990s, the utilization and expansion of madrassas allow the Taliban to manipulate and indoctrinate young minds. By eliminating support for critical thinking, quality education, and freedom of expression, the Taliban are keen to once again grow a steady pipeline of young foot soldiers loyal to their brutal objectives in Afghanistan, across the region, and around the world.

Additionally, the Taliban are using state resources to harass, humiliate, and intimidate students and education staff. This includes the removal and replacement of existing school administrators with religious stalwarts. “The Taliban’s virtue and vice ministry has in some schools instructed principals to examine the bodies of girls as young as 10 or 11 for signs of puberty – and to expel from school any girls who appear older or whose bodies are beginning to mature,” Belquis Ahmadi, Senior Program Officer at the United States Institute for Peace, noted.

In addition to the blatant attack on educational access, the Taliban’s use of corruption and kleptocracy is also intensifying the bleak state of health care within the country. Again, women and children are enduring most of the fallout.

While medical access was by no means perfect before the Taliban’s return to power in 2021, “Afghanistan had made considerable progress over two decades in increasing the coverage of health services and improving some health indicators,” according to a 2022 article in The Lancet.

Already teetering on the edge of a collapse because of the international withdrawal and deep reliance on international assistance, Afghanistan’s health care system faces serious staff and resource shortfalls as a result of the Taliban’s corrupt approach to governance and indifference to human suffering.

The Taliban have prioritized security and military spending over the most essential needs of the Afghan population, according to an analysis from Zan Times, even as an economic crisis has pushed more than half of Afghan households into acute food insecurity, growing instances of water scarcity, and rising rates of maternal and infant mortality and preventable diseases.

UNICEF estimated that in 2023, 875,000 children required treatment for severe acute malnutrition and 840,000 pregnant and breastfeeding mothers experienced acute malnutrition.

Though the Taliban regularly claim that the West ultimately ignored and abandoned Afghanistan’s health care infrastructure, the vast majority of the country’s remaining medical sites are solely propped up by international support. This includes salaries (paid by UNICEF) for desperately needed health care workers as need only continues to grow.

But violence and intimidation, high taxes, and other financial demands on nonprofits and medical facilities; restrictions on women’s free movement; and shortages in trained health care staff have left many of the most critical patients without any chance of receiving the proper care necessary to survive.

Many international nonprofits and U.N.-backed programs have had to scale back efforts or leave Afghanistan entirely due to funding challenges and serious safety and transparency concerns stemming from the Taliban’s interference in humanitarian aid. This has further impacted access to care for many vulnerable Afghans, according to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA).

As a result of funding gaps and human capital and other resource shortages, “more than 260 clinics reportedly went out of service in June, depriving 2 million people of health care,” Voice of America reported in August 2023.

Because of widespread barriers, 88% of respondents to a Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) survey from 2022 reported they “delayed, suspended, or forewent seeking medical care and treatments.” About 52% believed that a relative had died “due to lack or delayed access to health care.”

At the same time, health care clinics have seen a considerable surge in need. UNICEF-funded health facilities alone saw a 15% to 50% increase in patients, according to a Washington Post report. And over 300 districts across the country face significant levels of unmet needs – including nutrition, health care, and water, sanitation and hygiene – according to the Revised Humanitarian Response Plan (June – December 2023) from the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

This, in turn, puts additional strain on remaining services. Doctors and nurses work absurdly long hours – with many going weeks and months without pay. Power cuts have increased in frequency, impacting lifesaving medical equipment like ventilators and infant incubators.

In one of the most haunting reflections of the dire state of health care access in Afghanistan, distressed families have turned to opium and other sedatives as a cost-effective means to alleviate pain and hunger related ailments, even for children.

While health care workers in many instances have been granted waivers from the broad bans on women’s employment, restrictions in education and workforce training are slowly eliminating women from essential medical roles. On several occasions, female medical students were prevented from taking final and exit exams required to practice as doctors or pursue specialties, recent UNAMA reports show.

Make no mistake, the medical professionals who courageously continue to care for their patients amid overwhelming stressors and significant personal risks are nothing short of heroes. But the Taliban continue to do little to change health care outcomes for the better, directly affecting the lives of millions of children and women across the country, especially those in rural areas. And over the long term, this has a profound impact on medical services for the entire Afghan population, regardless of gender.

“We don’t have equipment, and there is a lack of trained staff, especially female staff. When we are looking after so many in serious conditions, which child should we check on first? There’s nothing we can do but watch babies die,” an Afghan nurse identified as Sultani said in a 2023 BBC report.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Health continues to propagate a message that the health system is not “in an emergency situation.” Yet, at the same time, senior Taliban leaders have applied for and been granted travel ban exemptions for medical treatment in countries like Turkey because adequate care wasn’t available in Afghanistan.

Though leverage has changed since the international withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, mechanisms exist to hold individual Taliban members to account for their egregious violation of human rights. With strength in numbers, U.S. leadership and multilateral cooperation are especially imperative.

The 35 countries (including the United States) that have adopted the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act should collectively designate the Taliban leaders responsible for gender apartheid and other human rights abuses. The Global Magnitsky Act allows the United States government (and other countries that have similar legislation) to impose targeted sanctions and visa bans on individuals responsible for corruption, kleptocracy, and human rights abuses.

U.N. member states that don’t yet have a Magnitsky law on record should mobilize on the development and passage of similar legislation, again collaboratively designating Taliban leaders.

Most importantly, the United States and others must apply greater pressure on existing allies who continue to enable Taliban corruption by way of travel waivers, access to regional and global markets, and the safeguarding of assets within their financial systems.

These actions would not only magnify the international community’s ability to confront the abuse and corruption of the Taliban but would also deter other malign actors around the world.

Gender apartheid should be recognized as a crime against humanity within international and national legal frameworks. The global community has yet to formally expand the definition of apartheid beyond race to reflect other severe forms of state institutionalized prejudice and exclusion based on identity. This minimizes global responsibility and limits legal and multilateral mechanisms available to counter repressive regimes built on systematic discrimination.

The Taliban have leveraged gender-based subjugation as a cornerstone of their repressive rule and are unrelenting in their dehumanization of Afghan women and girls. Of the dozens of restrictive edicts imposed on the Afghan people by the Taliban, approximately two-thirds focus on strategically undermining the rights and status of female members of society.

This policy of oppression on the basis of gender in many ways mirrors the egregious racial discrimination and segregation that existed in South Africa and South West Africa from 1948 to the 1990s. The U.N. Human Rights Council stated that the current situation in Afghanistan “constitutes gender persecution and an institutionalized framework of gender apartheid” in a July 2023 report.

Advocacy campaigns led by Afghan and Iranian women – like End Gender Apartheid Today – continue to do incredible work in driving this effort. As the Taliban and the Islamic Republic of Iran continue to expand on their repression of women and girls in their respective countries, global solidarity is needed now more than ever.

One of the most impactful ways that the international community can stand behind their condemnations of the Taliban’s actions is by expanding support for women-led organizations that courageously continue their work in Afghanistan.

In the face of extreme gender-based oppression, personal security risks, and other human rights abuses, dedicated Afghans, including women-led organizations, continue to push to fill community voids in basic infrastructure, critical services, and essential needs.

However, many of these efforts are excluded from formal aid pipelines, partnerships, and capacity-building opportunities. About 77% of women’s organizations in Afghanistan didn’t receive any funding in 2022, according to UN Women and the International Rescue Committee. Many were forced to cease existing projects or operations in their entirety.

The funding shortfalls that prevent these organizations from reaching vulnerable populations has dire consequences for the provinces they serve, particularly as the Taliban continue to repress the status and well-being of women and children. Moreover, lack of support from the international community undermines the organizations’ negotiating power with local Taliban leaders. This, again, undermines their ability to access key populations in need of assistance.

The vast majority of peace negotiations on Afghanistan from 2005 to 2020 excluded female representation. While some space has been created for Afghan democracy and women’s rights advocates to be heard, more must be done to expand inclusion and representation.

Governments and international organizations have offered de facto recognition to the Taliban by yielding to their preferences and meeting exclusively with the group’s representatives, often with male-only delegations. Going forward, global leaders must put words of solidarity into action by ensuring the presence and perspectives in international discourse on Afghanistan of those most impacted by the Taliban’s return to power.

Women, ethnic and religious minorities, civil society leaders, and members of the Afghan diaspora should be invited to participate. Special representatives of governments and international organizations to Afghanistan should also regularly consult with a wide variety of Afghan stakeholders, prioritizing intergenerational, regional, and socioeconomic diversity.

Taliban censorship, bans on freedom of expression, and waning international attention have decimated journalism and independent research in Afghanistan. Over the last two years alone, “more than 300 media outlets have closed, and many journalists and media activists have left the country,” according to BBC News.

Amid the void, courageous Afghan-led outlets like Zan Times, Rukhshana Media, Zawia News, and Afghan Peace Watch are doing tremendous work to fill information gaps and amplify the experiences of vulnerable Afghans across diverse provinces. This includes virtual trainings and mentorship programs in support of new and citizen journalists in addition to investigative reports and data collection efforts.

But these platforms and others like them cannot continue to do this vital work alone. Increased investment and opportunities for partnerships can lend an enormous boost to the capacity and reach of these important outlets, especially in their efforts to document the experiences of women and children and other marginalized populations.