Joy as Fatima, 8, sold by her starving family, is allowed to go to school

An eight-year-old Afghan girl who was sold into marriage by her father to save the rest of their family from starving will see her dream of going to school come true this week.

Fatima shed tears yesterday as she was given her uniform and first pair of shoes. “I am so happy,” she said, shyly. “I heard I can play with my classmates and will have school books.”

The family, like millions of Afghans, have found themselves on the edge of starvation since the Taliban seized power last August and the subsequent freezing of international aid and government assets prompted economic collapse. The latest UN assessments estimate that only 4 per cent of the population has enough food.

When Fatima’s desperate plight was featured in The Sunday Times in January, her family were living on just eight pieces of bread a day shared between 30 relatives.

Creditors were at the door of their freezing mud-walled shack in western Kabul, demanding repayment for money Fatima’s father Lala Jan had borrowed to pay for medical treatment after being badly burnt in an airstrike in their home in Helmand. Lala Jan had sold Fatima for £630 and was even considering selling her three-month-old sister. “We don’t have any choice,” he shrugged then.

Fatima’s hope of going to school seemed a forlorn wish and her eyes were pools of sadness. “Whenever we speak of her marriage she cries, saying she doesn’t want to leave us,” Lala Jan said.

Last week, her tears turned to those of joy. Amid international scepticism, the Taliban have announced they will reopen all schools this week after tomorrow’s holiday for Nowruz, the Persian new year — including girls’ high schools which have been shut since they took over.

Fatima will be among those attending after her family received help from Too Young to Wed, a small charity that provides livelihood support and works with communities to reverse sales of girls into marriage. They gave them food including flour, cooking oil, sugar and tea as well as uniforms for Fatima and her 12-year-old brother who has also never gone to school. They are working with Lala Jan to help him set up a mobile grocery cart to provide him with a daily income so he can buy her back, which he has committed to do.

“We don’t give money as that could be reversed,” said Basir Mohammadi, the charity’s regional director. “The point is to help them find a sustainable income to live and pay back the money.”

Lala Jan said: “We have a hope now. It feels like we are given a new life.”

The organisation was set up by Stephanie Sinclair, an American photojournalist, in 2003 after she saw girls in the burns unit at Herat hospital who had set themselves alight to escape abusive marriages they had been forced into.

Since the Taliban seized power, she has watched the numbers of girls being sold multiply. “I never imagined that almost 20 years on this would still be a problem and that there would be many more families and girls of younger and younger age. In the past the youngest I met was 11. Now I am routinely seeing girls of eight like Fatima, some as young as four, married off to men decades older.”

“Sadly girls are the last to be fed and first to be sold,” she added.

They have helped 372 families over the past seven months, mostly in western Afghanistan. A recent survey of 1,000 families in Badghis province found one third had sold or were about to sell daughters. “In some places it’s harder to find families who have not sold daughters,” Sinclair said.

So widespread is it becoming that in December the Taliban issued a decree banning child marriage. But many families are too desperate to care.

Veronica Njikho, a gender programme specialist for Unicef, said it had recently come across a case of Mariam, a seven-month-old baby exchanged to marry an old man. She warned that girls being out of school was making them more vulnerable.

Clare Daly, an Irish MEP, told the European parliament last week that child marriage in Afghanistan is up 500 per cent. “My God, they must be wondering what makes their humanitarian crisis so unimportant,” she said.

Some Afghans are even selling their kidneys as well as their daughters.

A BBC report last week said that at the main hospital in Helmand so many children are were dying of malnutrition that they receive another sick child “every few seconds”. The crisis has been exacerbated by a measles epidemic. The hospital has 300 beds, but is seeing 800 patients a day, most of them children. Many more never make it.

The fear is that with attention and resources now diverted to the war in Ukraine, Afghanistan has been forgotten, despite warnings that millions may die of famine, its economic crisis compounded by the worst drought in decades and years of war.

So concerned is Filippo Grandi, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, that last week he spent four days in Afghanistan, even as millions of Ukrainian refugees poured across European borders.

“As much as the world is rightfully preoccupied with the war in Ukraine, Afghanistan is experiencing a very grave crisis,” he said. “When 25 years ago this country fell off the radar screen, it ended very badly ... we cannot go down the same road.”

Grandi said the war in Ukraine had already affected raising funds for Afghanistan. His organisation, UNHCR, has managed to raise only $97 million of the $340 million it needs for this year. In January, the UN made its biggest single-country aid appeal, calling for about $4.4 billion for what it warned was the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis. So far it has only received 13 per cent.

As the desperation intensifies, more and more girls are likely to be sold. The frightening future they face was highlighted this week when yet another woman arrived at Herat hospital burnt from head to toe. Arezza, 26, said she had been forcibly married at 13, and repeatedly beaten by her husband and in-laws. After giving birth to her second child, she set herself on fire.