Afghanistan

Coordination

OCHA leads coordination of the humanitarian response in liaison with the DfA and between international and national humanitarian actors through the HCT at the strategic level and the ICCT at the operational level both in Kabul and in the field. OCHA Afghanistan will continue to scale-up its efforts in response to the multi-faceted crisis, as well as ensuring a well-coordinated response addresses needs arising from ongoing conflict and natural disasters. OCHA leads on the Humanitarian Programme Cycle, including response planning through the ICCT and regional and provincial coordination platforms, and continues to support humanitarian partners with joint advocacy, access and civil-military coordination.

The regional coordination mechanisms include Regional Humanitarian Teams, ICCG, and Operational Coordination Teams for the Central region, including the Central Highlands, and the Eastern, Southern, Western, Northern and North-Eastern regions. There is ongoing work to expand the level of coordination capacity at the regional level.

OCHA’s unique information management capacity allows real-time sharing of situation and response analysis with donors and partners to inform planning, programming and advocacy. OCHA also continues to expand its regional and local coordination support – engaging on a more local level with de facto authorities and communities.

The Afghanistan Humanitarian Fund (AHF) supported a staggering 120 projects in 2023, totalling $135 million, and implemented several innovative approaches such as the AHF Partner Cash Facility, constant/rolling allocations since 2021, NGO capacity building programs focusing on women-led and women’s-rights organizations, promoting the participation and inclusion of local women’s rights and women-led organizations in the AHF governance structure, as well as increased quality partnerships with local and national non-governmental organizations (NNGO), enhancing localization, and supporting complementarity and humanitarian-development-peace (HDP) nexus with bilateral donors and other funding mechanisms. These innovations, coupled with robust risk management, project monitoring and real-time information sharing provided to donors, maintained the AHF’s ability to be highly flexible – even at a much larger scale – and thereby fit for purpose in Afghanistan’s changing environment.

To support coordination in 2024, OCHA requires $13.9 million.

Camp Coordination and Camp Management

In support of monitoring of IDPs living in informal settlements, the CCCM Working Group with its partner REACH plans to assess all informal settlements in 34 provinces. This initiative combined with quarterly monitoring, thanks to CCCM Mobile teams, will expand its data collection and close monitoring of the situation facing people living in informal settlements where the aid community has not traditionally collected comprehensive data in the past. Also, the information collected will certainly contribute to a better transition for IDPs willing to return, helping them to integrate locally or to establish themselves somewhere else with the support of development partners within the durable solutions' framework. To support CCCM in 2024, the working group requires US$1.6 million to develop site profiles, information management systems and training and capacity building on CCCM approaches in 2024.

Gender

The Gender in Humanitarian Action (GiHA) Working Group is an inter-cluster technical working group. The GiHA WG serves as an inter-agency and inter-cluster coordination mechanism that offers technical, advisory and support services. This technical support includes the collection of sex and age disaggregated data and gender analysis of needs, risks, progress and gaps, and the translation of these into the HNRP, cluster-specific plans, ensuring and gender-responsive and transformative programmes and service delivery for crisis-affected populations that adequately identify and address the needs of women and girls.

In response to the ban on women working in NGOs and other measures, the GiHA is expanding its initiatives to develop a gender response programming risk mitigation strategy, ensuring women’s continued participation in the humanitarian response and scaling up gender-responsive monitoring and evaluation tools that find ways to ensure that humanitarians are able to understand and respond to the specific needs of women and girls. In 2024, this will include a Rapid Gender Analysis of the Humanitarian Response, as well as perceptions surveys on people’s access to assistance and accountability to women and girls, humanitarian response snapshots looking at the response composition and women‘s participation; and thematic studies, including on the ability of women organizations to continue operating in the current context.

The GiHA Working Group and related projects will require $2.38 million for coordination, information management, gender analysis and assessments in 2024.

Accountability to Affected Populations (AAP)

Revitalised in 2020, the AAP Working Group has set out to support a humanitarian response that considers the voices of affected people, their communication and response preferences and their feedback received through collective mechanisms. In 2024, the AAP Working Group plans to further strengthen and expand collective feedback mechanisms, building AAP systems and sub-national AAP capacity.

Collective accountability also will be strengthened in 2024 through further provision of common, accurate, clear and useful information to IDPs, refugees, marginalized and minority groups, and others based on their information needs and provided through their preferred channels and languages. Two-way communication channels for giving feedback that will be strengthened are expected to allow identification of specialized ways to reach women, people with disabilities, older people and children. To support this collective AAP effort, US$5.45 million is required for 2024, including $3 million for the Community Voices and Accountability Platform as well as $2.45 million for Awaaz.

PSEA

An additional $850,000 is required for PSEA to proactively mitigate, investigate, and address sexual exploitation and abuse cases.

Evidence-based Response

The HNRP also includes funding for common data collection, and management and analysis services to support an evidence-based response. IOM’s DTM requests $7.5 million to continue its work on monitoring and analysing population flows both across borders and within the country. This includes additional resources needed for increased tracking of movements in light of the economic shocks, tense regional dynamic and ongoing drought and conflict, and the possibility of both increased returns and new patterns of displacement.

iMMAP requests USD $317,000 to establish a severity risk index (SRI) and early warning mechanism for natural hazards and providing natural hazards risk analysis and mapping services to clusters in Afghanistan.

United Nations Humanitarian Air Services (UNHAS)

UNHAS’ updated budget is estimated at $41.3 million for 2024, a 25 per cent increase compared to last year, to maintain essential domestic and international air services for humanitarian personnel and cargo. This will allow UNHAS to maintain its regular domestic and international operations, including air bridges from Islamabad, Dushanbe, Doha and Dubai and provide reliable access across the country to meet the needs of aid organizations to send staff members on essential missions. The budget also includes medevac capacity for personnel working with UN agencies, NGOs, and diplomats to enable them to stay and deliver.