KABUL (TCA) — More than 16 million Afghans are in serious need of humanitarian aid, said a spokesman for the World Food Program (WFP) in Afghanistan, adding that hunger and lack of food security are threatening half of the country’s population, Afghan broadcaster TOLOnews reported.
According to WFP, nearly 4 million people in Afghanistan have lost their income sources following the outbreak of COVID-19.
“Afghanistan still should be the focus point of the international community. Afghanistan is one of the countries where the level of hunger, lack of food safety and poverty are still very high because of the coronavirus,” said Wahid Amani, a spokesman for the WFP in Afghanistan.
Nafisa Reshtin, who has been associated with the WFP program for a decade, said: “When the authorities ordered lockdowns across the country to quell the spread of COVID-19, from one day to the next, street vendors stopped pushing their carts through the residential areas of Kabul. Suddenly, they were part of the 16 million Afghans that WFP estimates are at risk of going hungry as their livelihoods have been disrupted by the pandemic.”
“I interact with some of the 10.3 million people the WFP plans to serve in Afghanistan in 2020, including 3 million beneficiaries struck by the socio-economic impact of COVID-19. Many people are struggling for survival and worry more about where their next meal will come from than about getting sick with coronavirus. I just met a woman who told me that she could not stay at home even for a single day during the lockdown because she needed to make money to buy food for her family. She works as a dish washer after funeral ceremonies. She probably washed dishes at ceremonies held for people who died of COVID-19. Our minister of health recently said that 10 million people in Afghanistan are estimated to have been infected by the virus,” added Reshtin.
Based on the UN statistics, in the initial days of 2020, the number of those in humanitarian need in Afghanistan was around 12 million people, but 4 million additional people were added to the number following the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to WFP, there is a need for $218 million until the end of the year to cover over 10 million Afghans in dire need of aid.
Source: TCA
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