ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has offered to host a summit of foreign ministers from the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) next month to address the looming humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi said.
The United Nations has repeatedly warned that Afghanistan is on the brink of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, and Qureshi said the OIC “must step in to help our Afghan brethren”.
“We should step up our collective efforts to alleviate the humanitarian needs of the Afghan people,” he said in a statement.
The offer comes after a request from Saudi Arabia, which currently chairs the 57-member group.
It will likely be the biggest international gathering on Afghanistan since the Taliban’s return.
After the Taliban seized power on the heels of a US withdrawal in August, more than half of the country is facing “acute” food shortages.
The prospect of a long hard winter is raising the spectre of mass starvation and migration.
The international community has been wary of funding aid efforts through the new Taliban government, considered a pariah owing to its links to terrorism.
WORLD BANK TO PROVIDE FUNDS:
The World Bank is finalising a proposal to deliver up to $500 million from a frozen Afghanistan aid fund to humanitarian agencies, people familiar with the plans told Reuters, but it leaves out tens of thousands of public sector workers and remains complicated by US sanctions.
Board members will meet informally on Tuesday (today) to discuss the proposal, hammered out in recent weeks with US and UN officials, to redirect the funds from the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF), which has a total of $1.5 billion.
Afghanistan’s 39 million people face a cratering economy, a winter of food shortages and growing poverty three months after the Taliban seized power as the last US troops withdrew from 20 years of war.
Afghan experts said the aid will help, but big gaps remain, including how to get the funds into Afghanistan without exposing the financial institutions involved to US sanctions, and the lack of focus on state workers, the sources said.
The money will go mainly to addressing urgent health care needs in Afghanistan, where less than 7 percent of the population has been vaccinated against the coronavirus, they said.
For now, it will not cover salaries for teachers and other government workers, a policy that the experts say could hasten the collapse of Afghanistan’s public education, healthcare and social services systems.
They warn that hundreds of thousands of workers, who have been unpaid for months, could stop showing up for their jobs and join a massive exodus from the country.
The World Bank will have no oversight of the funds once transferred into Afghanistan, said one of the sources familiar with the plans. A US official stressed that UNICEF and other recipient agencies would have “their own controls and policies in place.”
“The proposal calls for the World Bank to transfer the money to the UN and other humanitarian agencies, without any oversight or reporting, but it says nothing about the financial sector, or how the money will get into the country,” the source said, calling US sanctions a major constraint.
— With additional input from Reuters
