Around five million women and children in Afghanistan are expected to suffer acute, life-threatening malnutrition over the next year, with nearly four million children in need of treatment, as international aid cuts force clinics to close and push families into desperate coping strategies, the World Food Program (WFP) said.
Quoted by AFP, John Aylieff, WFP’s Afghanistan director, said the scale of the crisis was “staggering” in a country of more than 40 million people that remains heavily dependent on humanitarian assistance. Funding for Afghanistan surged after the Taliban returned to power in 2021 but has since been repeatedly reduced, even as economic hardship and unemployment have deepened.
Aid shortfalls have already led to the closure of clinics treating malnourished children, Aylieff said, warning that the consequences would be fatal for some. “If we can’t treat children with malnutrition, those children are going to die,” he said, describing cases in which women travel for hours to reach health centres only to be told there are no resources left to help their children.
The crisis is increasingly affecting pregnant and breastfeeding women, with WFP reporting a sharp rise in maternal malnutrition as mothers sacrifice their own food intake to feed their families. In areas where assistance has been reduced or halted, families are turning to extreme measures, including pulling children out of school, sending them to work and marrying off girls at an early age, Aylieff said.
Taliban have faced international criticism for barring women from most jobs and restricting girls’ education beyond age 12, measures that aid groups say further undermine household incomes and access to services.
WFP said it was receiving a growing number of distress calls from women across the country. “This is very harrowing,” Aylieff said, urging donors to reverse funding cuts to prevent the crisis from worsening further.
