Attachments
Overview
Key messages
• Afghanistan’s food security crisis persists, with 15.8 million people (nearly 40 percent of the population) facing acute food insecurity from November 2023 to March 2024.
• Large-scale humanitarian food assistance from late 2021 to early 2023 helped to improve the situation, but reduced aid in 2023, expected to worsen in 2024, threatens progress.
• WFP reached 18.6 million people in 2023, with 80 percent being women and children. Women continue to access aid, though challenges persist for women humanitarian workers to be fully deployed.
• WFP supported communities to build resilience against climatic shocks and women with livelihoods.
By the end of 2023, more than 15.8 million people in Afghanistan (36 percent of the population) continued to face acute food insecurity, of which 2.8 million experienced emergency levels of food insecurity.
The nation confronted a dire humanitarian crisis, compounded by economic struggles, climatic adversities, political complexities, and a surge in returnee refugees and internal displacement, which was further exacerbated by sociopolitical directives impacting the rights of women and girls, issued by de facto authorities. As a result, 9 out of 10 Afghan households struggled to afford sufficient food with over two-thirds of the population requiring humanitarian assistance in 2023.
The directive issued by de facto authorities on 24 December 2022, restricting Afghan women from working with non-governmental organizations, and a further ban on April 2023 restricting UN female staff impacted humanitarian activities across the country, including those implemented by WFP. However, WFP’s emergency food and nutrition distributions continued, with women beneficiaries allowed at distribution sites. WFP and partners worked relentlessly to negotiate with the de facto authorities for the permitted presence of female partner staff at all sites where activities are implemented.
WFP, a key player in Afghanistan since 1963, assisted nearly 19 million people, including 9.3 million women and girls, providing life-saving food, nutrition and livelihood support totalling over 600,000 mt of food and USD 189 million in cash-based assistance.
However, despite WFP's extensive efforts, severe funding constraints and delayed contributions for some activities led to the unfortunate reduction of emergency food assistance for 10 million people in 2023. Rations for communities experiencing emergency levels of acute hunger were reduced from 75 to 50 percent due to funding shortfalls.
In October 2023, multiple high-magnitude earthquakes and aftershocks shook the province of Herat in western Afghanistan. Dozens of villages were affected, many of them entirely flattened with more than 150,000 people affected.
Within eight hours of the initial earthquake, WFP swiftly mobilized and dispatched food to affected communities. WFP and partners assessed the needs and supported the affected communities in a well-coordinated inter-agency response.
Over the course of three months, WFP provided 1,137 mt of food to 110,000 people in four districts affected by the disaster. WFP also supported the wider humanitarian response through the provision of logistic services, ICT, mobile storage units and fleet support. In addition, WFP also provided services to prevent and treat malnutrition among children (6-59 months) and pregnant and breastfeeding women and girls, to address the critical needs of these individuals particularly vulnerable to food insecurity.
As more frequent climate shocks battered communities in Afghanistan, WFP helped boost their resilience by developing or rehabilitating sustainable community infrastructure through its food assistance for assets (FFA) programme.
Smallholder farmers participated in training on using sustainable agricultural practices, strengthening their value chain, and reducing post-harvest losses. WFP's food assistance for training (FFT) projects were particularly crucial for women to learn new skills to diversify their livelihoods.
Under the school feeding component, WFP reached 1.5 million school-aged children with in-school meals and take-home rations across ten provinces. School meals continued to serve as an incentive for boys and girls to attend school. High Energy Biscuits (HEB) were served to 1.4 million primary school and community-based education boys and girls in Grades 1-6, while take-home rations were distributed to 117,251 primary schoolgirls. Bread+, a homegrown initiative, reached 149,871 children, helping to create value chain linkages and job opportunities by linking local