Afghanistan

In 2026, the HNRP will reinforce accountability, inclusion and quality as core enablers of effective life-saving assistance. The operating context remains highly restrictive, particularly for women and girls, while persons with disabilities, older persons, and returnees continue to face layered barriers to accessing assistance. These constraints require systematic, adaptive and field-driven accountability and inclusion mechanisms to ensure that assistance remains safe, relevant and responsive to evolving needs.

Restrictions on women’s mobility, employment and participation, alongside bans on women working with the UN and NGOs, have continued to reduce women’s access to aid and services in 2025, widened economic dependence and deepened psychosocial distress. These systemic barriers have also eroded gender-responsive and safe programming, limiting the ability of humanitarian partners to identify and address women’s priorities, particularly for women-headed households and survivors of gender-based violence.

Surveys indicate that over half of national female humanitarian staff are no longer able to work from the office and 37 per cent are no longer able to join official UN or NGO missions.¹ While humanitarian actors have made extensive efforts to identify workarounds and localised arrangements to the existing bans, funding cuts have had a disproportionate impact on their ability to budget for women’s participation. Almost 40 per cent of partners are unable to cover mahram costs or transportation costs for women staff due to reduced funding.²

The current decrease in funding has also led to reduced humanitarian coverage, with the provision of humanitarian assistance falling from 34 per cent to 24 per cent in 2025, 72 per cent of surveyed households reported receiving assistance that was appropriate but insufficient to meet their needs.³ Food (81 per cent) and livelihoods (56 per cent) remain the top needs, while water (37 per cent), health and protection (32 per cent) are rising in priority due to prolonged drought and water scarcity.⁴ Women and persons with disabilities report lower awareness of feedback mechanisms and lower satisfaction with aid quality, highlighting the need to strengthen accessible communication, inclusive targeting, and partnerships with women-led and disability-led organisations.

Sexual Exploitation, Abuse and Harassment (SEAH) risks remain high and protection needs are dire, while mental health needs have also sharply increased across the population. Women, WHH and people with disabilities are among the most marginalised. Children are also at heightened risk of abuse, particularly in situations of poverty, displacement or where community protection structures have been disrupted.

Response strategy

In 2026, cross-cutting priorities will focus on strengthening the feedback-to-action system, embedding gender and disability inclusion throughout the programme cycle, and ensuring that women’s voices and leadership shape the provision of safe, accountable and equitable humanitarian assistance. Localisation will be supported through greater inclusion of WLOs and organisations of people with disabilities as cluster partners and recipients of humanitarian funding. To enhance communication with communities, guidance on accessible messaging and communication channels will be issued, and trusted mechanisms for reporting sensitive issues, including SEAH, GBV and other protection concerns, will be strengthened.The Afghanistan Community Voices and Accountability Platform will be scaled up in collaboration with Awaaz Afghanistan to maintain an accessible, gender and disability inclusive helpline. Partners will receive support to harmonise community feedback and complaints mechanisms that reach people with limited literacy, mobility or digital access, including through the development of feedback materials in Braille, sign language and plain language formats.

Support for women humanitarian workers will continue through identifying suitable engagement modalities, assisting clusters and partners on recruitment and retention, and providing capacity building on negotiations. The Women’s Advisory Group (WAG) to the HCT will continue to be supported to ensure women’s perspectives are reflected in the response, and data from the Community Voices Platform, Gender in Humanitarian Action (GiHA)/HAWG surveys and disaggregated feedback will help identify inclusion gaps, track progress and inform sectoral strategies.

Cross-cutting working groups, including the Assessment & Analysis Working Group and the Cash Working Group (CWG), will maintain their capacity building support to clusters, cluster partners, Regional Teams (RTs) and Operational Coordination Teams (OCTs) on accountable, inclusive and gender responsive programming, including the participation of at-risk groups such as women and people with disabilities, and on tools to generate gender and age disaggregated data. Quality programming will be further reinforced through continued review of Afghanistan Humanitarian Fund (AHF) partner proposals and the rollout of Protection from Sexual Exploitation, Abuse and Harassment (PSEAH) Standard Operating Procedures. The Protection from Sexual Exploitation and Abuse Network (PSEA Network) will continue to strengthen coordinated prevention efforts, survivor centred response, and safe and accessible reporting systems.

Monitoring

In 2026, the Accountability and Inclusion Working Group (AIWG) and the PSEA Network will continue community perception monitoring on system-wide accountability, drawing on existing local channels. Progress on accountability and disability inclusion will be informed by data from the Community Voices Platform and the Awaaz Helpline. The PSEA Network will complement this with risk assessment and monitoring tools, including the Sexual Exploitation and Abuse Risk Overview, which analyses SEAH risk levels and contributing factors across all 34 provinces.

The GiHA and HAWG will continue quarterly surveys on the impact of directives targeting Afghan women and girls, including national female humanitarian staff.

These surveys provide insight into partners’ negotiation challenges, the restrictions shaping operational delivery, and the resulting effects on women affected by crises and on women staff.

Together with qualitative field engagement through focus group discussions, system-wide perception surveys supported by cluster partners, monitoring missions by the working groups, local inputs from regional working group presence and joint monitoring mission with clusters, these tools will provide a clear picture of implementation practices and gaps. This will help identify good practices and recommendations to strengthen accountable, inclusive and gender responsive programming, and to improve the quality and appropriateness of assistance based on community feedback.