2. Rationale
2.1. Background
After more than forty years of conflict and natural disasters, it is estimated that 24.4 million of people are in humanitarian need in Afghanistan in 2022, according to the Humanitarian Response Plan. Throughout 2021, Afghanistan has remained in crisis, facing protracted conflict and the collapse of the government, recurrent natural disasters including a second drought in 4 years, and increasing poverty rates exacerbated by the global pandemic. Overall, the country faces severe and rising food insecurity, malnutrition and lack of economic opportunities, with 93% of the population (35 million people) living on less than 2 USD a day and in need of a social safety net.
According to IOM, since 2012, more than 5.8 million people have been internally displaced by armed conflict, generalized violence, human rights violations, as well as natural and human-made disasters in Afghanistan and remain in prolonged or protracted displacement.3 According to Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP), 700,000 people had been internally displaced by conflict alone in 2021 (of which 60% are children).4 Despite the decrease of active fighting after the change of regime in August 2021, the economic situation combined with climatic disasters and the increase in communal violence is expected to continue driving internal displacement. Indeed, the HRP anticipates 504,000 newly displaced people in need across the country in 2022.
Of particular concern are those households living in informal settlements (ISETs), who lack secure land tenure, often have reduced access to essential services, and consequently raised levels of overall vulnerability.5 According to REACH’s informal settlements monitoring, 78% of all settlements are located in urban and peri-urban areas, where inhabitants struggle with competition for land, and live under regular threat of eviction.
Area-Based Assessments (ABAs) conducted by REACH between November 2021 and February 2022, identified approximately 46 separate sites in Mazar-e-Sharif housing 9,501 IDP households (51,388 individuals). Similarly, in Jalalabad, approximately 26 separate IDP sites housing 54,075 HH (371,525 individuals), are established in and around the city.6 Populations in these sites, or informal settlements (ISETs) have been shown to be especially vulnerable, consistently facing issues such as restricted access to basic services, land tenure, poor sanitation and shelter conditions, unaffordability of basic goods, and lack of livelihoods opportunities. REACH’s more recent ABA profiling of ISETs in four key cities in Afghanistan (Herat, Kunduz, Mazar, and Jalalabad) has reinforced this understanding of vulnerability, and highlighted acute humanitarian needs. ISETs were found to have low access to key services, i.e. education facilities (24% compared to 100% in the first ABA assessment), and no available public water sources (27% compared to 58%). Findings from this assessment showed ISET and host communities often present similar needs, however ISET populations presented higher vulnerability due to more exhausted resources and reduced coping capacity. 7 Host community populations further expressed concerns that ISET populations were overstretching their limited existing services, which raised tensions between communities. Continuing instability from the limited economic resources and access to services is likely to magnify the scale and severity of need amongst these populations. Moreover, due to a lack of legal status, humanitarian actors are often constrained in how they may intervene and provide services in these areas. In addition, as many of these ISETs are established on the periphery of the city, there is a likelihood that arrivals to those sites may increase in the upcoming months as climate, food insecurity and conflict continue to impact surrounding areas. In order to reach and assist these populations, greater knowledge through coordinated regular monitoring on the locations, vulnerabilities, and issues faced by ISET populations is critical.
In addition to REACH’s nationwide ISETs assessment in late 2020, these four ABAs have only served to further highlight the significant knowledge gap in Afghanistan regarding Informal settlements (ISETs). These sites as well as the needs of the population living there are still largely misunderstood; this indicates the need for area-based assessment initiatives in ISETs across other urban areas where lack of robust, localized, standardized, and up-to-date data has resulted in the absence of a coordinated humanitarian approach, limiting the ability of the humanitarian community to design responses to these dynamic contexts. Furthermore, the increasingly dynamic context of displacements and returns, with continued identification of newly displaced households in ISETs, at the same time as local governments are planning the relocation of these populations in some areas in Afghanistan, indicates an increasing need to design and monitor arrival and departure patterns at the site level to better reach and address the needs of these populations. It is also essential to help coordinate the response of partners by area to target newly displaced and vulnerable people living in ISETs, while pursuing the assistance to those residing in prolonged and protracted displacement.
In collaboration with all partners involved in the Camp Coordination and Camp Management Working Group (CCCM WG) in Afghanistan, and to inform better local-level coordination, REACH will lead the development and standardization of information management tools through the development of a ‘toolkit’ for ABAs in ISETs. This toolkit promotes the areabased approach, which provides a holistic approach to assess populations at a particular geographical area which can often involve population of different displacement status, but occupy the same areas and endure similar conditions. REACH developed toolkit that will be adopted by the CCCM Working Group, in order to conduct detailed assessments, which will be shared both at national and local level with implementation partners and coordination structures, as well as affected communities, to enable accountability to affected populations, as well as feed into local, regional and national coordination and response planning forums.