The Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TIKA) delivered 2,000 aid kits to help Afghanistan fight malnutrition plaguing the country’s children. The aid, donated by the Kabul office of Turkey’s leading development aid agency, aims to prevent illnesses aggravated by malnutrition.
Organized under the coordination of Afghanistan's Healthy Ministry, the kits were sent to the provinces of Helmand and Zabul in ceremonies on Monday.
Sayed Ahmad Said, who heads Helmand’s provincial health department, thanked the people of Turkey for the aid “of vital importance” for children. Abdul Hakim Hakimi, head of the health department in Zabul, said his country was going through a difficult stage and the kits may save thousands of lives. “Malnutrition affects whole families. An undernourished mother means children would be undernourished. This is a life-saving campaign and meaningful as it came from a brotherly country,” he said.
Speaking at the ceremony, Zühtü Çal, TIKA coordinator in Kabul, said that health was the priority in their projects in Afghanistan and that the agency sought to play an active role in preventing high fatalities from malnutrition.
Kits will be distributed at health clinics to mothers diagnosed with illnesses. They include 15 kilograms (33 pounds) of fortified flour, a 30-tablet packet of multivitamins, around a liter of fortified oil, a box of BP-5 biscuits (a high-calorie, vitamin-fortified food) and about half a kilogram of a micronutrient powder made of beans and peas.
TIKA has provided health care services to over 12 million people in Afghanistan over the past 17 years as part of an agreement with the country's Health Ministry.
Among the facilities that played a crucial role in providing these services to over 12 million people are the Afghan-Turkish Friendship Hospital in the Maymana district of Faryab province and the Children's Hospital in the Sheberghan district of Jowzjan province. In 2010, TIKA also established the Maymana Midwife Training School and around 94 women have been trained as midwives. The school also includes an emergency services unit, a polyclinic, a general surgery, a pediatrics section and a vaccination center.
TIKA also built clinics that provide both basic and comprehensive health services in addition to procuring medical supplies and outfitting the facilities.
According to United Nations, 1.1 million children under the age of 5 will likely face the most severe form of malnutrition this year in Afghanistan, as increasing numbers of hungry, wasting-away children are brought into hospital wards.
The U.N. and other aid agencies were able to stave off outright famine after the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan last year, rolling out a massive emergency aid program that fed millions. But they are struggling to keep pace with relentlessly worsening conditions. Poverty is spiraling and making more Afghans in need of aid, global food prices are mounting from the war in Ukraine and promises of international funding so far are not coming through, according to an assessment report issued in May.
As a result, the vulnerable are falling victim, including children but also mothers struggling to feed themselves along with their families.
UNICEF, the U.N. children’s agency, said 1.1 million children this year are expected to suffer from severe acute malnutrition, also known as severe wasting, nearly double the number in 2018 and up from just under 1 million last year. Severe wasting is the most lethal type of malnutrition, in which food is so lacking that a child’s immune system is compromised, according to UNICEF. They become vulnerable to multiple bouts of disease and eventually they become so weak they can’t absorb nutrients.
The numbers of children under 5 being admitted into health facilities with severe acute malnutrition have steadily mounted, from 16,000 in March 2020 to 18,000 in March 2021, then leaping to 28,000 in March 2022, the UNICEF representative in Afghanistan, Mohamed Ag Ayoya, wrote in a tweet in May.
Hit by one of its worst droughts in decades and torn by years of war, Afghanistan was already facing a hunger emergency; but the Taliban takeover in August threw the country into crisis. Many development agencies pulled out and international sanctions cut off billions in finances for the government, collapsing the economy.
Millions were plunged into poverty, struggling to afford food for their families. By the end of last year, half the population of around 38 million lived under the poverty line, according to U.N. figures. As the economy continues to crumble and prices mount, that could rise this year to as high as 97% of the population by mid-2022, according to the U.N. Development Program.
U.N. agencies launched a massive, accelerated aid program after the Taliban takeover, ramping up to a point that they now deliver food assistance to 38% of the population. The number of people facing acute food insecurity fell slightly from 22.8 million late last year to 19.7 million currently, according to a May report by Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), a partnership among U.N. and other agencies that assesses food security. From June to November this year, that number is expected to fall a little further, to 18.9 million, the IPC said. But those small reductions “are far from indicating a positive trend,” it warned.
The decrease was low compared to the scale of the aid, it said. Moreover, deteriorating conditions threaten to overwhelm the effort. It pointed to the continued crumbling of the economy, higher food and fuel prices and supply disruptions caused by the Ukraine war, and “unprecedented inflation” in Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, lack of funding threatens aid’s reach. The proportion of the population receiving food aid could plummet to only 8% over the next six months because so far only $601 million of the $4.4 billion needed has been received from the world community, the IPC said. Just over $2 billion has been pledged.
Melanie Galvin, chief of UNICEF’s nutrition program in Afghanistan, said the 1.1 million children figure came from the agency’s annual assessment, conducted last fall and based on expected conditions. “Every year, all the factors connected to malnutrition keep going up,” she told the Associated Press (AP) in May. It just keeps going up and up in terms of a deteriorating situation. Drought has been the main driver of food insecurity, she said, compounded by growing poverty, lack of access to clean water and to medical care, need for greater vaccination for diseases like measles that hit malnourished children.
The good news is that agencies have access to the entire country now, she said. UNICEF opened around 1,000 treatment sites in remote locations where parents can bring their malnourished children rather than having to trek to larger urban centers. But an emergency response is not sustainable in the longer term, she said. “We need all these factors in the external environment to improve.”
