Afghanistan Accountability Index Mid-year Report (January - June 2024), Issued November 2024

Background

Between January and June 2024, humanitarian actors in Afghanistan reached 12.1 million people with at least one form of humanitarian assistance and up to 1.9 million people with three different types of sectoral support. The Afghanistan Accountability Index (AAI) seeks to delve beyond the absolute numbers reached and monitor how well the response was able to adequately meet the needs of the population, ensure their meaningful and safe participation in the response, particularly for the most vulnerable groups and for humanitarian workers and to maintain safe access. In so doing, the AAI aims to analyse not only the ability of humanitarian actors to access affected populations – and, in particular, Afghan women, girls and people with disabilities – but also the ability of affected populations to access assistance and services themselves.
The AAI follows up on and strengthens the work conducted through the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) Monitoring Reports/Pulse Checks produced in 2023, which focused on the ability of the humanitarian community to safeguard the quality and inclusivity of humanitarian action in Afghanistan in light of the increasingly restrictive environment for Afghan women and girls following the Taliban de-facto authority (DfA) bans on Afghan women working for non-governmental organizations (NGOs), later extended to the United Nations.
The AAI continues to examine Afghan women’s participation in the response and efforts by organizations to secure localised arrangements for Afghan women staff to continue working but has been complemented by additional indicators which explore accountability to affected populations (AAP), disability and inclusion, protection from sexual exploitation and abuse (PSEA) the proximity of humanitarian organizations and operations to people in need and localisation efforts.1 In addition to monitoring, the AAI aims to shed light on the ‘actionable insights’ of accountability, meaning the steps or corrective actions that organizations need to continuously take to adjust their programmes in light of both the permissiveness of their operating environment and the feedback they are receiving from communities. With this, the AAI is more than just a monitoring system and rather a real-time mechanism to improve and adapt inclusive humanitarian assistance based on the expressed needs and priorities of affected communities.