Afghanistan: Humanitarian Update, September 2024
Highlights:
Providing warmth and dignity for vulnerable Afghans ahead of harsh winter conditions - Page1
New morality law further restricts rights in Afghanistan - Page 2
Planning for the 2025 Humanitarian Programme Cycle - Page3
Providing warmth and dignity for vulnerable Afghans ahead of harsh winter conditions
On 9 September, the Inter-Cluster Coordination Team (ICCT) issued an Inter-Sector Winter Prioritisation Plan for early onset winter in Afghanistan focusing on underserved locations with seasonal risks where residents are facing acute compounding multi-sectoral vulnerabilities. With the La Niña weather phenomenon expected to hit by October 2024 and continue into early 2025, it is anticipated that the upcoming winter will be colder and dryer than usual. To ensure adequate and timely preparedness, the ICCT took early initiative to develop a comprehensive plan to address the linkages and intersection of needs and response capacities. With humanitarian needs still omnipresent across the entire country, the reality is that the difference in needs between high priority and lesser priority areas is only marginal in some places, although the Plan naturally aims to pruoritise the most acute needs and pressing gaps in the first instance.
The plan was based on a collective analysis of winter scenarios and assumed risks, an analysis of each Cluster’s priorities at the district level, and a realistic assessment of where capacity can be availed. A multi-sector vulnerability approach was applied considering areas where temperature decreases and snow cover persists (relying on analysis from the past five years); winter season risks are high; sector-specific vulnerabilities are acute, and people are underserved.
Based on this analysis, some US$603.5 million is urgently required to support priority winter preparedness activities such as upgrades and repairs to shelter and the provision of warm clothes and blankets. These activities must be implemented before the end of the last quarter of 2024. In addition, $104 million is needed to pre-position supplies, including for food and livelihoods assistance, for distribution in the first quarter of 2025 before areas get cut off by the weather. Due to the high food security needs during the lean season and the time needed to procure and transport supplies to remote and weather-affected locations for the duration of winter, food and livelihoods assistance accounts for more than 75 per cent of the $603.5 million required for immediate winter preparedness activities, and over 40 per cent of the $104 million needed for prepositioning.
To support winterization efforts under this Prioritization Plan and to further strengthen localization efforts, the Afghanistan Humanitarian Fund has already launched an allocation of $15 million with 80 per cent of the funding dedicated to NGOs (30 per cent to local and national NGOs and 50 per cent to international NGOs) and project implementation planned to commence at the end of the month. While some support to basic services has also occurred through the basic human needs (BHN) funding stream, it remains significantly less than the large-scale international development support provided before mid-August 2021.
New morality law further restricts rights in Afghanistan
On 21 August, the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (MoPVPV) published a new law – also referred to as the ‘morality law’ – imposing tightened restrictions for all people in Afghanistan, with special attention to women and minority groups. Reportedly under development for over a year, the law codifies previous restrictions (such as the March 2022 decree requiring all women in Afghanistan to wear full-body coverings in public), while also including some new ones, and giving broad discretionary powers to inspectors.
In an official statement, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG) and Head of the UN Assistance Mission (UNAMA) in Afghanistan, Roza Otunbayeva, called the law “a distressing vision for Afghanistan’s future” and expressed concern over the wide-ranging and far-reaching restrictions on personal conduct, the powers of enforcement the law has given to morality police, and the extension of already-intolerable restrictions on the rights of Afghan women and girls.
The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) further stated that the new law “deepens the Taliban's already oppressive grip on the lives of Afghans. It reinforces and expands existing discriminatory policies, such as mandatory dress codes [for all genders], the requirement for women to have a male guardian (mahram), and the segregation of men and women in public spaces”. Particularly concerning is the authority given to inspectors to enforce compliance and impose punishments on a seven-grade scale ranging from public rebuke to immediate detention. Initial concerns identified by humanitarian actors of how enforcement of the law could impact humanitarian response included: negative effects on the presence and participation of Afghan women both in the office and field, limits in the access of female healthcare workers to the community and patients, and the unacceptable toll on the mental health and wellbeing outcomes of Afghan women and men, including UN and NGO personnel.
On 18 September, the Security Council received a report on the situation in Afghanistan presented by the SRSG and a briefing from the UN Women Executive Director, Sima Sami Bahous which both underscored the disproportionate effect of the law on women and girls, both psychologically and for their daily routines.
In response to promulgation of the law, monitoring is being carried out by a wide range of UN entities including UN Human Rights, the Programme Management Team, the Operations Management Team and the Gender in Humanitarian Action (GiHA) and Humanitarian Access Working Groups (HAWG). The latter have recently circulated the 9th round of their GiHA & HAWG survey on the continued impact of the bans on Afghan women working for NGOs and the UN and other restrictions on Afghan women and women-led organizations, including the recent morality law. Findings from the survey are expected to be available towards the beginning of October.
Planning for the 2025 Humanitarian Programme Cycle
With the collaboration of partners, OCHA Afghanistan has initiated the start of the 2025 Humanitarian Programme Cycle (HPC), an annual planning exercise which includes the development of the Humanitarian Needs Overview and Humanitarian Response Plan—which since 2024 has been combined into a single document, the Humanitarian Needs & Response Plan (HNRP).
To engage all actors from across Afghanistan’s vast humanitarian and basic human needs (BHN) landscape, a series of cross-cutting and thematic workshops have been held since early August on a range of topics. These include workshops on Data to try to encourage a more joined-up approach to data collection and analysis across humanitarian and BHN actors (in collaboration with the Resident Coordinators Office); on Gender Analysis to strengthen the inclusion of gender-related considerations in needs analysis (hosted by the Gender in Humanitarian Action team); on Risk Analysis and Scenario Building to outline the key shocks, impacts and affected population groups to inform future analysis; and a joint discussion between the ICCT, Programme Management Team and Durable Solutions Working Group to help establish a shared understanding of humanitarian and BHN response activities, reflect on how the scale-up of basic human needs activities influences humanitarian programming, and determine how HNRP activities can be focused on core humanitarian needs, while non-core activities are reflected in the UN Strategic Framework for Afghanistan (UNSFA).
Future workshops focusing on strengthening disability analysis (hosted by the Disability Inclusion Working Group), and better integrating PSEA activities (led by the PSEA Network) are scheduled. In parallel, OCHA and the ICCT are pursuing discussions with the ACBAR NGO forum to set out a guidance framework for the costing of humanitarian activities for the 2025 HNRP.
To broaden inclusion and to strengthen transparency of the overall HPC planning process, OCHA will focus on extending these discussions to the sub-national level over the coming weeks. Meanwhile, senior management across the sector is liaising with donors to keep them informed on progress and integrity of the process and to possibly link up funding with programme cycles. In all these efforts, the office in Afghanistan has been following guidance from the acting USG for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Joyce Msuya, and OCHA’s global Assessment, Planning and Monitoring Branch. Amidst decreasing global funding streams towards humanitarian and BHN assistance, the humanitarian community in Afghanistan is committed to providing an evidence-based prioritization and setting realistic boundaries for needs and implementation capacities on which the Humanitarian Coordinator and the Humanitarian Country Team can build the next annual appeal.