Here is another plan for Gordon Brown (After five brutal years of Taliban rule, Afghan women and girls need our help – and I have a plan, 4 August). In a very few years Afghanistan will have no female doctors, nurses or midwives. For the Taliban have not only stopped girls’ education and codified child marriage, but have banned contraception and forbidden women and girls to access male health providers. Inevitably, there will be a huge increase in maternal and neonatal mortality.

One way the UK could help is by its well endowed independent girls schools offering A-level science bursaries to those Afghan girls who wish to study medicine, have learned English online and can show that they have the ability to follow such a course.

I have been corresponding with such a girl, now 15, who longs to become a doctor so she can care for her sisters. Even if passports, visas, travel, etc may be problematic, just offering such bursaries would be a way of keeping this gender apartheid in Afghanistan in the spotlight. Independent schools enjoy questionable charitable status. Here is a way of justifying it.
Margaret Owen
President, Widows for Peace Through Democracy