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Afghanistan's Aid Collapse Leaves 74% of Population Without Basic Needs, One Million Women and Girls Without Support

UN agencies warn Afghanistan faces one of the world's largest displacement crises, with 74% of the population unable to meet basic needs, while aid cuts have left at least one million women and girls without critical humanitarian support.

social issues

— 4 mins read

Afghanistan has become one of the world’s biggest displacement crises, a condition driven by overlapping waves of poverty, drought, and earthquakes UN agencies warn Afghanistan faces one of the world’s biggest displacement crises amid poverty, drought and earthquakes, with 74% of population (29 million people) unable to meet basic needs. Seventy-four percent of the population — 29 million people — is now unable to meet basic needs, and the UN projects 570,000 Afghans will need resettlement in 2026.

That crisis is unfolding against a backdrop of international aid cuts that have dismantled the organizations designed to respond to it, particularly for women and girls. A UN Women report found that aid cuts have left at least one million women and girls without critical support, with 63% of women’s organizations reducing services in remote areas and 84% reporting increased demand.

The mechanics of that collapse are not abstract. Eighty-six percent of organizations report rising gender-based violence, and half have waiting lists or turn women away, a scale of unmet need that amounts to an intentional dismantling of the support infrastructure that had been built up over decades. The 2.7 million returnees mentioned in the UN report are not returning to a country with the capacity to absorb them — they are entering a place where the aid groups that might have offered shelter, food, or protection are closing their own doors.

For the women and girls who had been relying on those services, the cut is not just a statistic. It is the difference between a place on a waiting list and being turned away, between a remote clinic that is still staffed and one that has shut down because the funding for its last employee ran out. The UN Women report frames this in terms of a reduction in services, but the more accurate frame might be a wholesale repossession of a safety net, pulled out from under a population that had been told it would be there.

The displacement crisis and the aid collapse are not separate stories. They are the same story told at two different levels of magnification: a country where three-quarters of the population cannot meet its basic needs is also a country where the organizations meant to address those needs are themselves being hollowed out. The report on the 74% poverty rate and the report on the million women and girls losing support are, functionally, two different ways of describing the same structural failure.

What distinguishes Afghanistan’s crisis from other large-scale displacements is the timing. The poverty and the earthquakes are not new, but the withdrawal of the humanitarian capacity to respond to them is — a conscious, policy-driven choice by donor countries to reduce funding at precisely the moment the need is accelerating. This is not a natural disaster overwhelming a response; it is a response being switched off while the disaster is still unfolding.

The result is a system degrading in real time. The 84% of organizations reporting increased demand are not describing a theoretical future need. They are describing a present-tense reality where more people are asking for help than ever before, and the organizations themselves have fewer resources than ever before to give it. A crisis on the scale of 29 million people without basic needs is, by definition, too large for any aid operation to solve. But the withdrawal of the operation designed to mitigate it ensures the crisis will be felt at its fullest possible intensity, with no intervening structure left to absorb the shock.

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