Badghis Province is located in the isolated hills of northwestern Afghanistan and shares its borders with Herat, Ghor, and Faryab provinces as well as Turkmenistan. The province has a total area of 20,591 km2. Hydrologically, the province is dominated by the Murghab River which is used for irrigation. The province is very windy; the name "Badghis" is a corruption of the Persian compound "bâd-khiz", meaning "wind source", referring to the steppe winds that blow into the province from the north and northwest. Its northern border extends to the edge of the part of the Karakum desert known as the Sarakhs desert. Northern Badghis includes the loess and other aeolian formations, known locally as the "chul", through which the Turkmen-Afghan boundary runs. Across the border in Turkmenistan is the Badhyz State Nature Reserve in the Badkhiz-Karabil semi-desert.
History
Prior to the Arab conquest, the province was the center of the Kingdom of Badghis, whose king Tarkhan Tirek resisted an Umayyad invasion in 709 AD. In 1964, the province was carved out of portions of Herat Province and Meymaneh Province. The province was one of the last captured by the Taliban in their military offensive before the American invasion in 2001. The province was quickly retaken by Northern Alliance forces as the United States initiated hostilities.
Demographics
Like in the rest of Afghanistan, no exact population numbers are available. The Afghan Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation & Development along with UNHCR and Central Statistics Office of Afghanistan estimates the population of the province to be around 499,393. Tajiks are the majority, making around 62% of the province’s population. The other 38% is made up of mostly Pashtuns and smaller Hazara, Uzbek, Turkmen, and Baluch.
Badghis is counted as one of the most underdeveloped of the country's thirty-four provinces. Not only does it have little infrastructure, and poor roads, it has a chronic shortage of water. Agriculture is the main source of people's income and the existence of the Murghab River makes the available land suitable for cultivation. The province has suffered from severe drought beginning in the late 1990s and continuing. It has caused tens of thousands of residents to flee to refugee camps outside Herat. The drought has been exacerbated by excessive cutting of forests since 2001. Badghis is the leading province in Afghanistan in pistachio production. It is also one of the carpet-making areas of the country.
Transportation
Badghis Province suffers from a lack of adequate transportation. A single airport exists at the provincial seat--Qala i Naw Airport, which is capable of handling light aircraft. Work on a 233 km section of the Afghan ring road started up again in 2012. This section would connect Bala Murghab with Herat in the southwest, and Maymana and Mazar-i Sharif in the northeast.
Healthcare
The percentage of households with clean drinking water fell from 11.6% in 2005 to 1% in 2011. The percentage of births attended to by a skilled birth attendant increased from 15% in 2005 to 17% in 2011. Official government figures for 2007 indicated that 17% of the Badghis population had access to safe drinking water, while only 1% of births were attended by a skilled person.
Education
According to information of education department, there are 457 schools with 75 high and the rests are primary and secondary schools. As many as 120,000 students with 35% of them are female students. There is one vocational high school of agriculture and one midwife training Institute in the province as well. However, as of 2007 the overall literacy rate was only 9.5%.
