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OVERVIEW
Households in Aybak district have faced steadily worsening challenges in meeting basic needs in recent years, especially in the last 12 months, driven in particular by rising unemployment, drought across Samangan, and the impact of the 2025 earthquake (EI 28/01/2026 a; EI 07/01/2026; EI 08/01/2026; EI 01/01/2026; EI 27/01/2026 b). The arrival of IDPs fleeing drought, flooding, and the earthquake’s impacts from other parts of Samangan – along with returnees from Pakistan and Iran, who congregate in Aybak city – has strained the already fragile services and infrastructure of this small, relatively urbanised provincial centre. Reliance on daily wage labour, an often insecure and unreliable income source, is notably high compared with other districts and increasingly competitive following the arrival of climate IDPs and returnees from abroad. Access to humanitarian assistance, community support, and more reliable employment opportunities, for example in the civil service, is often determined by social connections, potentially excluding women and other marginalised groups.
In this increasingly pressured context, households in Aybak district face significant unmet needs, with the unaffordability of food, health, rent, and education cited as major challenges. The most common cause of concern for participants in this study was the cost of basic goods and services, rather than their availability. That said, clean water was highlighted as both unavailable and too costly, as were healthcare and education in more rural parts of the district. Different households and individuals experience varying degrees of vulnerability to these unmet needs, but nearly all rely on coping strategies with potentially harmful consequences, including a notable proportion of interviewed households that regularly go entire days without eating, and/or send their children to work. Under the strain of these needs, traditional structures of community-based support are eroding.