Afghanistan Critical Funding Gaps (June 2024)

SITUATION OVERVIEW

As of mid-June, the 2024 Afghanistan Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan (HNRP) is significantly underfunded, with just US $615.7 million received—20.1 per cent of the initial request. This shortfall comes as humanitarian needs in Afghanistan remain extremely severe due to stubbornly high levels of food insecurity and malnutrition, protracted displacement, widespread explosive ordnance contamination, recurrent natural disasters, communicable disease outbreaks, climate change effects, political estrangement, and increasingly – since August 2021 – the imposition by the De-facto Authorities (DfA) of ever-more restrictive policies on women and girls’ rights which have hindered their access to assistance and services, as well as their involvement in public life. These needs persist against a backdrop of forty years of war, entrenched poverty and heavily conditioned support for both shorter- and longer-term interventions which are essential to maintaining the basic functionality of critical civilian infrastructure such as schools, hospitals and water systems.

In the past two months, the combination of three years of successive drought-like conditions and spring rainfall led to flash flooding across large parts of the country affecting 120,000 people and resulting in widespread human, agricultural and livestock losses. At the same time, some 25,000 families affected by three earthquakes in Herat Province last October remain in makeshift shelters, more than 610,000 Afghan returnees from Pakistan have arrived to equally vulnerable host communities since September 2023, 3.4 million people live within 1 km of explosive ordnance, and the learning of 300,000 schoolchildren – not counting the 1.4 million teenage girls’ already out of school due to the ban on their secondary education – is on hold due to the transition of community-based education (CBE) classes to provincial educational departments, which lack the technical capacity, funds, and donor buy-in to continue.

Currently, the humanitarian response in Afghanistan is facing an overall funding shortfall of around $2.45 billion, with critical funding gaps of $1.1 billion, excluding the $238.3 million reported by Clusters that is in the pipeline. Funding shortages have already prevented 3 million people from accessing primary and secondary healthcare services, 1.3 million children under five and 470,000 pregnant and lactating women from receiving Blanket Supplementary Feeding Services, left 234,000 people without the resources to respond to acute watery diarrhoea (AWD)/cholera, delayed the provision of longer-term shelter support for thousands of earthquake and flood-affected households, and resulted in partial implementation of child protection services, particularly case management and structured psycho-social support. Moreover, supply chains for six of the seven Clusters – Education, FSAC, Health, Nutrition, Protection, and Shelter – are at imminent risk of disruption.

Without further funding, critical life-saving programmes – including mobile health and nutrition teams that service hard-to-reach areas; inpatient treatment for severely malnourished children with medical complications; psychosocial and protection support for children; mine action; food and livelihood assistance; and provision of dignity kits for women and girls of reproductive age during sudden-onset crises – risk further reduction and closure.

At the same time, these funding shortfalls impact humanitarian actors’ capacity to prioritize immediate needs over safeguarding issues such as sexual exploitation and abuse, as well as inclusive programming which is critical to address the needs of women, girls, and people with disabilities in the context of multiple restrictions on Afghan women, including prohibitions on their working for the United Nations (UN) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the lack of license renewal for organizations of persons with disabilities (OPDs).

This analysis aims to support donor funding decisions by highlighting critical funding gaps in the humanitarian response across Afghanistan. The gaps highlighted focus both on the funding gaps to date for each sector and cross-cutting areas, as well as the anticipated impact of continued underfunding in the coming months (June to August 2024). The process of reconciling reported Financial Tracking Service (FTS) funding streams will continue over the coming weeks. This also includes unpacking the ‘sector not specified’ and ‘multi-sectoral’ funding which currently stand at $70.6 million.

To enable humanitarian actors to respond efficiently, effectively, and equitably, donors should provide early, unrestricted and multi-year predictable funding which allows for response to a range of activities. Donors are also encouraged to increase their international engagement with the de-facto authorities (DfA) to include technical support and knowledge-sharing to increase mutual trust and contribute to a more enabling environment.