Afghanistan: A team of female doctors and nurses walked six hours across mountains, dry river banks and unpaved roads in June 2022 to reach victims of a devastating earthquake in eastern Afghanistan that killed more than 1,000 people .
When they arrived there a day after the earthquake, they found that the men had been treated, but not the women. In Afghanistan’s deeply conservative society, women remained confined to their tents, unable to seek medical aid and other assistance because there were no female aid workers.
“There was still blood on the women’s bodies,” said Samira Sayed-Rahman of the aid agency International Rescue Committee. The women came out for treatment only after meeting local elders to inform them about the arrival of the women’s medical team.
“It is not just a situation in emergencies; In many parts of the country, women do not go out to seek help,” he said.
It’s an example of how important women workers are to humanitarian work in Afghanistan, Syed-Rahman said — and it reflects the impact they’re having after the Taliban banned Afghan women from working in NGOs last month. will be felt.
Ban faced widespread shutdown
The ban, announced on 24 December, forced the widespread closure of many aid operations by organisations, which said they could not and would not operate without their female staff.
Aid agencies have warned that hundreds of thousands have already been hurt by the disruption of services and that if the restrictions continue, the serious and deadly consequences for a population suffering decades of war, worsening living conditions and economic hardship will be widespread.
Aid agencies and NGOs have been keeping Afghanistan alive since the Taliban seized power in August 2021. The blockade of international financing from this takeover, the stagnation of currency reserves and the cut off from global banking, further collapsed the already fragile economy.
NGOs have breached, and are providing everything from the provision of food to basic services such as health care and education. Following the ban, 11 major international aid groups suspended their operations entirely with some smaller ones saying they could not operate without their female workers. Many others have dramatically reduced their workload.
According to UN Women, a post-ban survey of 151 local and international NGOs found that only 14 percent were still operating at full capacity. UN agencies continue to work – most importantly to maintain the food lifeline that is saving millions of Afghans from starvation.
World Food Program provided aid despite ban
Despite the ban, the World Food Program provided cash transfers for food staples or meals to 13 million people in December and the first week of January – more than a quarter of Afghanistan’s roughly 40 million population.
The extent of the ban’s implementation and enforcement is unclear. In some places, some women have been able to continue working in the field. Still, the impact is already great, the agencies say.
The International Rescue Committee, which has suspended all its operations, estimates that some 165,000 people missed its health services between 24 December and 9 January.
It warned of a rise in death and disease due to the restrictions and an increasing burden on Afghanistan’s health system, which it said was “already fragile, near-collapse and dependent on NGOs.”
The IRC supports more than 100 health facilities in 11 provinces, including 30 mobile health teams, providing life-saving assistance in some cases to remote areas where there is no humanitarian aid of any kind.
“It’s the only health service some women have access to,” said Syed-Rahman of the mobile teams. “Some parts of Afghanistan still do not have hospitals, clinics or other medical facilities. With each day that passes, the suspension has a huge impact on aid funds.
IRC also helps provide clean water, tents, cash and other necessities to families displaced by war and natural disaster. In total, IRC programs helped 6.18 million people between 2021-2022 – more than double the amount from the previous one-year period. While large amounts of food aid continue to flow in, vital nutritional programs have come to a halt. Save the Children was among the agencies that completely suspended their activities on 25 December.
‘Save the Children’ extended a helping hand before the ban
As a result, thousands of people have not received nutritional support. Before the ban went into effect last month, Save the Children helped nearly 30,000 children and nearly 32,000 adults with nutrition, including providing calorie and vitamin-rich peanut paste to babies and toddlers and oatmeal for women .
The halt has also disrupted cash transfers to 5,077 families who received one round of money in December but none from further planned rounds – funds they depended on for food and other supplies. The number of child malnutrition in Afghanistan is high and rising, with an increase of 50 percent over the past year.
According to UN figures, this year nearly one million children under the age of 5 will face the most severe form of malnutrition. According to the World Food Programme, nearly half of Afghanistan’s 41 million people are projected to be severely food insecure between November 2022 and March 2023, with more than 6 million on the brink of famine.
“The lives of children (in Afghanistan) hang in the balance,” said Keyan Salarkia of Save the Children. “If you don’t get the right kind of food in the first 100 days, it affects the rest of your life,” he said.
In cases of severe acute malnutrition, after 10 days “you start sliding into loss of life,” he said.
The ban will affect people in Afghanistan
Salarkia said the sanctions would affect almost everyone in Afghanistan in one way or another. Save the Children was also providing classes for children, vaccinations and child protection. Its cash grants helped families realize that they would not have to sell their children for marriage or wages.
Read also: UN rights chief Volker Turk condemns restrictions on Afghan women, urges Taliban rulers to lift them
Without that support, more children would be married off or forced to work. “The ripple effect of this will be huge, which is why we expect it to reverse very quickly.”
Salarkia recalled the impact when Save the Children briefly ceased work for security reasons following the Taliban takeover in August 2021.
The stay only lasted a couple of weeks, but workers with mobile health teams said some of the children they regularly saw never returned.
“The situation changes so quickly,” he said.