Afghanistan faces severe humanitarian crisis: OCHA

KABUL (TOLONews): The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said that Afghanistan is rapidly moving towards a cliff edge due to severe under-funding and bans on female aid workers which are disabling aid delivery at a time when 28.3 million people need life-saving assistance to survive.
OCHA said in a report that even with 20 million people facing severe hunger and six million of them one step away from famine, the appeal is less than 5 per cent funded having received only $213 million so far. OCHA appealed for US $4.6 billion.
“The world cannot abandon the people of Afghanistan at this precarious moment,” said the head of OCHA in Afghanistan, Ramiz Alakbarov, in the report. “While we continue to engage with the Taliban de-facto authorities to find a solution to these decrees, we urge the international community not to punish the Afghan people further by withholding critical funding. Aid agencies remain on the ground delivering lifesaving assistance to millions of people, and national and international NGOs have continued to implement programmes over the past three months despite the very challenging circumstances. The population has already endured so much, it would be unconscionable to impose further harm on them by depriving them of an essential humanitarian lifeline.”
A spokesman for the World Food Organization in Afghanistan, Wahidullah Amani, said that the number of vulnerable people will increase if aid is not provided.
“If we don’t receive the new aid, the number of people relying on humanitarian aid may increase,” he said. The Ministry of Economy said that the humanitarian aid to Afghanistan is effective.
“We want the humanitarian aid to continue so that it can be helpful with rooting out poverty in the country,” said Abdul Latif Nazari, deputy Minister of Economy.
This comes as the residents of Kabul stressed that they need humanitarian aid now more than ever.
“We want them to include us in providing aid. I have no one… I pay 3,500 Afs rent for the house,” a resident of Kabul said.
This comes as the UN Assistant Mission ordered all its local Afghan employees to stay home until further notice after it received verbal orders to not allow female staff to work.