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Overview
Afghans faced unprecedented levels of hunger and malnutrition in 2022, as opportunities for work, education, and agriculture withered amidst economic turmoil, drought, earthquakes, floods, and increasing restrictions on human rights. More than 20 million people lived in ‘emergency’ or ‘crisis’ levels of food insecurity, and barely one in ten families managed to get enough to eat. As is often the case, women and girls felt the effects most deeply. To staunch the most extreme effects of hunger, WFP assisted 23 million people in Afghanistan in 2022, including 12 million women and girls, in WFP’s largest operation worldwide. They received emergency food, nutrition, and livelihoods support equaling more than 1.14 million metric tons (mt) of food and USD 326.9 million in cash-based assistance. The scale of assistance in 2022 was more than 50 percent larger than in 2021, reflecting the dramatic rise in needs and a massive operational surge.
In June 2022 an earthquake devastated Khost and Paktika provinces, killing 1,000 people and destroying hundreds of homes and livelihoods. Within 24 hours, WFP and partners were on the ground assessing needs, deploying logistics, and delivering support to the affected communities in a truly inter-agency response. Over the course of three months, WFP provided 3,691 mt of food to 101,000 people in six districts affected by the disaster, and supported other agencies’ connectivity, personnel and cargo transport, and storage.
As communities in Afghanistan are battered by more frequent climate shocks, WFP helped them boost their resilience by developing or rehabilitating sustainable community infrastructure through its food assistance for assets (FFA) programme. Smallholders participated in training on using sustainable agricultural practices, strengthening their value chain, and reducing post-harvest losses. WFP food assistance for training (FFT) projects were particularly crucial for women to learn new skills to improve their livelihoods.
While secondary schools in most of the country were closed to girls, WFP provided cash incentives to the families of more than 16,000 girls in provinces where they were still able to attend class. At the elementary level, and for community-based education, 470,000 boys and 250,000 girls received nutritious snacks, while 203,000 primary girls took home rations of vegetable oil to promote enrollment and attendance.
Nutrition and gender were incorporated into all activities. In particular, services to prevent and treat malnutrition among children (6-59 months) and pregnant and lactating women addressed the critical needs of these most vulnerable individuals.
Based on lessons learned in previous years, WFP prepositioned four times as much food in many more remote areas ahead of the 2022/2023 winter lean season compared to 2021. By December 2022, a total of 94,000 mt of emergency food and nutrition commodities was prepositioned in 12 provinces, enough to feed 1.5 million food-insecure people typically isolated during the harsh winter (January-March). WFP prioritized delivery to provinces such as Ghor, where 20,000 people were cut off and experienced famine-like conditions in the first part of 2022.
Given the exponential growth in field operations, WFP’s staff increased by 47 percent in 2022, and the percentage of female staff grew from 20 to 26 percent. Five new satellite offices were established in Bamyan, Faryab, Ghor, Kunduz, and Paktya, to complement existing Area Offices in Faizabad, Herat, Jalalabad, Kabul, Kandahar, and Mazar.
With the Afghan economy struggling, WFP’s operation contributed more than USD 672 million to the local Afghan economy, injecting approximately USD 56 million per month for local food procurement, transporters, warehousing, cooperating partners, financial service providers, retailers, handlers, porters, WFP national staff, and other contractors.
In 2022, 30 percent of all food commodities were bought locally, totaling 374,715 mt valued at USD 224.45 million, including 299,323 mt of fortified wheat flour, valued at USD 167.72 million, procured from 44 commercial and WFP-supported millers.
On 24 December, the de facto authorities announced that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) could no longer employ women, posing a substantial threat to humanitarian efforts. In line with the decisions taken by NGOs, donors, and UN agencies on the Inter-Agency Standing Committee and Humanitarian Country Team, WFP and its partners worked to prevent interruptions to life-saving assistance while ensuring that its women and men beneficiaries could be assisted by both women and men where possible.