One of the things I did in my job in Afghanistan was to do profiles of the districts. One of the things we would do was to go to the Ministry of Education and ask how many schools were open and how many girls were in school. We would generally get very promising numbers, which is why I wavered so much on the earlier question about the percentage, because I don't think anyone can really give a good percentage. The Ministry of Education would say they had a certain number of schools open and a certain number of girls in school. Then I'd tell my staff to talk to the people in the community and ask if they were sending their girls to school. Depending on the district, sometimes the answer would be, “Yes, it's all good,” and sometimes the answer would be, “No, we're not sending any of our girls to school”. So it varies.
As I said, I have a fairly specific regional knowledge in terms of the eastern Pashto-speaking areas. But for most districts the government statistics are the best they can do. I don't know if they're purposely padding the numbers, but the bottom line is that if they build 12 schools, they report that they built 12 schools. Whether or not people are able to go to those schools is a completely separate question that often isn't asked.