Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths’ opening remarks at the High-level Pledging Event for Afghanistan

Doha, 31 March 2022

As delivered

Many thanks Melissa. Thank you very much for this opportunity.

And thank you, Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, and of course Secretary-General.

Thank you all for being here.

I would like to add my thanks also to the Governments of Qatar, the United Kingdom and Germany for their deep commitment to the people of Afghanistan as evidenced by their co-hosting today.

I have just left Afghanistan today and in fact just arrived here in Doha.

I spent time in Kabul and Bamyan and I must tell you I saw human suffering during those three days that left me quite speechless In Kabul I visited the Indira Gandhi Hospital and saw severely malnourished children and new-borns clinging to life, sharing rundown, rickety incubators. These babies were emaciated, listless and far too small. And mind you, this is in downtown Kabul, not out in rural and poorer areas of this country.

One five-month-old baby, Zuleika was so weak, she couldn’t cry. Her eyes simply stared up at me with a glazed expression, as she opened and closed her mouth silently and next to her, her mother cried silently too.

I met another woman who was trying her best to keep her three-month-old baby alive.

She told us that she had already lost two of her children to starvation.

Hospital staff told me that three babies had already died the day we visited in that ward of about 20.

To any parent this feels unimaginable.The hospital staff work heroically to help these - the youngest of patients - have a chance at life. Their critical work is made possible by ICRC – we will hear more from Peter Maurer – who has stepped in to pay the salaries of the hospital staff. But also, with technical assistance and material support from WHO and UNICEF working seamlessly together.

When I asked the hospital director what he would want as a message, he said: “Please can you make sure that the support continues?” In recent months, life for ordinary Afghans has become even more unbearable as we have heard.
Six out of 10 people in Afghanistan need humanitarian aid, among them almost 6 million people have been uprooted inside the country. They need food and healthcare but also livelihood support. The economy is too weak to sustain the lives of its people.

As we have heard, we are appealing for US$4.4 billion, for this year, to provide lifesaving support. An all-time-high figure and I think we all wish it were not so.

But it tells indeed that life, as the Secretary-General said, is hanging on by a thread for more than half the people of Afghanistan.

With donors’ generous support, we will keep doing everything that we can, as we have been.

The emergency response has kept millions of vulnerable Afghans alive, including women and children.
Last year we reached close to half the population with life-saving aid.

Thanks to generous donor contributions, the humanitarian response since September has averted the worst. And indeed it was the best-funded appeal last year, providing a lifeline for millions of people.

I thank Afghanistan’s neighbours, and I am here in one of them, for providing a home to nearly six million of its people and I thank UNHCR and their High Commissioner for their leadership of the regional response.

Despite this, we are only just managing to stave off extreme food insecurity, preserving some essential services and barely preventing a complete meltdown of the country.

And as we have already heard from previous speakers and I’m sure we will from ones to come, whichever way you look at it, the people of Afghanistan need more than humanitarian aid alone. The situation is incredibly fragile.

Many humanitarian donors rightly point to the need for the de facto Taliban authorities to play their part and again we have heard this today. Many are especially frustrated by the recent decision to restrict access to education for girls and I completely share this frustration, as we all do.

And yet, and I want to say this plainly, we cannot make the people of Afghanistan suffer twice. They desperately need help. Please don’t reduce assistance because of this wretched statement that we heard last week.

I also want to report that I met with the Taliban in Kabul – because that is why I went there – and I heard a renewed sense of commitment to those assurances offered to me and the humanitarian community in writing [in 2021] which we discussed when the Secretary-General launched the appeal on September the 13th in Geneva.

And they reconfirmed their commitment to those promises for space and principle, for unimpeded access and operations for humanitarian assistance and for the freedom of all humanitarian workers to operate without hindrance.

And I left those meetings yesterday and the day before with a firm belief that the door to engagement with the de facto authorities remains open. They want to engage. They want to find a constructive path forward. They often don’t know quite how to achieve that with the international community and that includes very much on the very difficult issue of girls’ education which of course I discussed in some detail. My sense is that they have to resolve this in the near future just as we all hope that it will be resolved in the very near future.

There are opportunities ahead of us and we must seize them to secure a future for the people of Afghanistan. We must find productive ways, as Filippo Grandi recently said when he visited Afghanistan a short time ago, to engage in genuine dialogue with the Taliban.

And I was told this, indeed, by some of the Taliban leaders that I met in these last days, and they urged me to send that message to the international community. I believe they are ready to do so and I know, of course, that the UN is ready to do this. I spent time, of course, with the leadership of our very distinguished mission, UNAMA (United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan), in Kabul.

The challenge ahead of us takes political will, but it’s not insurmountable. We can get there together with patience, with dialogue, with understanding and also with insistence on values.

How do we help the people of Afghanistan find a glimmer of hope? To move forward I believe we need progress on several fronts. First, we need sustained, unconditional and flexible funding to help us continue to reach more people in our humanitarian response plan, in the Afghanistan Humanitarian Fund and in the regional response plan under the leadership of UNHCR.

Second, as the distinguished minister from Qatar, made very clear, we must find a way to get money back into the economy and into people’s pockets. The salaries of public sector workers, of healthcare workers, teachers and other essential services - the people that I saw in that hospital the day before yesterday - must be paid. These are the people that are critical to the survival of millions of Afghans.

And the provision of basic human needs, which has been discussed so much as a priority in Afghanistan is indeed for me one of the principal messages that I take away from this visit to Afghanistan. Humanitarian operations do not exist independent of other needs.

And thirdly, for this to happen, Afghanistan can no longer be isolated from the international financial system. Restoring the formal banking system is critical for the country and for humanitarian aid delivery, again, as the Minister of State of Qatar has said. And for that, the Central Bank must have necessary technical capacity and we need that Humanitarian Exchange Facility up and running as soon as possible.

We must also recognise the role, and we will hear from their leaderships, of regional entities like the Islamic Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank and of course the OIC [Organisation of Islamic Cooperation] which has already been mentioned, can play in restoring confidence in Afghanistan’s banking system and the measures to restore its economic agility but also to do so with appropriate accountability mechanisms.

And finally, the international community must find more meaningful and constructive ways to engage the de facto authorities on all those important issues we are discussing here today.

Only through dialogue can we ultimately address some of the most significant drivers of humanitarian need.

I hope we can make progress on these fronts together and I am very, very pleased and honoured to be part of this segment.

Thank you very much indeed.