Almost three months after the fall of Kabul, Afghanistan entered winter, and with it, a major food and health crisis for the Afghan population, deprived of international aid…

Afghanistan: "Malnutrition which will affect 1 million children is only the tip of the iceberg"

According to the World Food Program, hunger is likely to threaten 22.8 million people in November.

Here a woman and her grandchild at Indira Gandhi Hospital in Kabul, November 8, 2021. AP - Bram Janssen

Text by: Vincent Souriau

3 min

Almost three months after the fall of Kabul, Afghanistan entered winter, and with it, a major food and health crisis for the Afghan population, deprived of international aid since the Taliban came to power. .

Interview with Hervé Ludovic de Lys, representative of Unicef in the country.

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RFI: What is the scale of the crisis affecting Afghanistan

Hervé Ludovic de Lys:

To give you an idea, this year we had a humanitarian appeal to Unicef of around 197 million dollars.

However, the needs for the year 2022 will probably be more than a billion dollars.

They are going to be multiplied by ten compared to the past year, because the basic services system has collapsed.

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To read also: Afghanistan: public health on the verge of collapse

You walk into a family home, you see the state in which the families and the children are, and you realize very quickly that there is a problem.

It's a serious food crisis.

There are over 22 million Afghans who are acutely food insecure and the malnutrition that will affect 1 million children before the end of the year is just the tip of the iceberg.

With winter already here in Afghanistan, without water, without care, without food, if we do not respond very quickly, I believe that there will be a change in January or February.

What sort of tilt

This is the time when all household resources will have been exhausted, and this is combined with the economic crisis.

Even though some doctors or engineers have money in the bank, they cannot withdraw it.

Two hundred dollars a week is not enough when prices are skyrocketing.

The solution must be humanitarian, economic and monetary.

Without this, we are heading towards social movements at the beginning of 2022.

What is your discourse on the education of young girls, their access to school in Afghanistan

The most important effort is played at the local level.

It is not an official letter from Kabul that will influence the position of a regional governor.

There are provinces where girls go to school up to the baccalaureate - there are six of them.

And eight others where Taliban decision-makers are hesitating.

We have to create a chain reaction, that we reach a critical mass of regions where it rocks, hoping to influence the rest of the country through local leaders.

But there are obviously areas where it will be very difficult, especially in areas close to Pakistan, like Jalalabad, where ISIS is very active.

What is the position of the Taliban authorities vis-à-vis international agencies like Unicef

I was able to meet various ministers, both in Health, Education, Rural Development and Finance.

There is a clear need for the presence of humanitarian actors, since the Taliban have no public resources, nor the means to intervene on the ground.

They have no real choice but to let us work now, unless they want to go back to the obscurantism of the 1990s. And I believe that from that point of view, they have changed, even if the moderates will not have. doubtless no more voice in the chapter for a long time in the absence of tangible results of their policy of openness towards the international community.

Afghanistan: "Malnutrition which will affect 1 million children is only the tip of the iceberg"

Afghanistan: "Malnutrition which will affect 1 million children is only the tip of the iceberg"

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