Humanitarian situation in Afghanistan - Press Conference (28 February 2023) | United Nations

Hybrid press briefing by Ramiz Alakbarov, Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary-General, Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Afghanistan on the situation in the country.

The Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator for Afghanistan, Ramiz Alakbarov told reporters, “Afghanistan remains to be the world’s largest humanitarian crisis in 2023, notwithstanding the recent devastating earthquakes in Türkiye and Syria.”

Speaking to reporters via a video link today (28 Feb), Alakbarov said, “Last 18 months have seen a number of scaling effects of this economic decline and GDP in the in the period under review went down by 33-35 per cent in terms by the end of 2022.”

He continued, “The cost of the food basket is up 30 percent and the total loss of jobs is 700,000 people.”

Asked about girls education, the Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator said, “I regret to say that, until today, we haven't seen any news or any encouraging developments with regard to the girl’s education. We remain very aware, unfortunately, schools are closed.”

Alakbarov added, “the hope is that it has been one year since the ban and that the ban on the schools will be lifted. The UN continues to advocate for us. We continue to be in direct communication of the de facto authorities at all levels about the restart on schools for girls.”

He reiterated that the UN is “ready to assist with education programmes for girls as soon as the programmes and the schools resume.”

Asked about how the UN ensures that the aid reaches to the people in need instead of the Taliban, the Resident Coordinator said, “We have risk management and mitigation mechanisms including the payments distribution systems, which makes sure that no payment is made to these individuals or these organizations that are associated with these individuals.”

He added, “We engage with third party monitoring into all activities which are implemented in the country, and we do have actively functioning accountability to affect population mechanisms, so that the people who are benefiting from the provided the assistance that they have always open lines to communicate back to us about what is happening.”