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At the end of 2023, I wrote that despite a spate of natural disasters, mass expulsions of Afghans from neighbouring countries, aid cutbacks, and the Islamic Emirate’s continued refusal to re-open the doors of government-run schools to women and girls above the sixth grade, there was at least one reason to be “hopeful for Afghanistan”: Rather than waiting for aid organisations and the government, the people were finding ways to reach out and support one another.
Whether it was driving along the once-dangerous road to Paktia to help earthquake victims in neighbouring Paktika and Khost or taking to Instagram and TikTok to show the conditions Afghan returnees faced in Iran, Afghans were using any tools at their disposal to help their compatriots.
Now, as the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate heads toward its fifth year in power – which is as long as their rule in the 1990s lasted – that still holds true. I just wish those outside the country would finally learn from the Afghan people’s example and start to look for practical solutions to the myriad social, economic, and humanitarian challenges Afghanistan still faces.
Over the last four years, innumerable voices – Afghan and non-Afghan alike – have rushed to describe how bad the situation in the country is and how much (according to them) is not possible due to the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate government, but as the Afghan people have shown, there are still ways to find homegrown solutions and ways around the restrictions.
Assistance not handouts
After 20 years and tens of billions of dollars given to what Transparency International consistently adjudged to be one of the most corrupt governments in the world (the former Western-backed Islamic Republic), the Afghan people are asking for things that will allow the country to advance; things that should not be politicised. They are asking for investment and development – roads, bridges, factories, and power. Simply put, they are asking for uplift and assistance, not handouts.
Last year, I was in the southern province of Kandahar when elders in Spin Boldak district asked a US-based NGO to help them build a 400-metre dam that would provide year-round water and prevent flooding for upwards of 200,000 homes after provincial officials said they lacked the funds. However, foreign countries, including the United States, still refuse to engage in development assistance because it would mean working with an outlawed government; even if the project is NGO-run.
Knowing this, the NGO leader nodded and politely said, “I will try,” knowing full well that, once again, politics would make life-altering assistance nearly impossible.
When the issue of development assistance does come up, Western diplomats do not mince words. “It's hard to build roads or factories or big infrastructure projects without working with the government ministries,” Karen Decker, then chargé d'affaires of the US mission to Afghanistan, told The New Humanitarian last April.
This belief – that withholding development aid is some kind of show of political strength and pressure – affects even smaller projects that do not require direct government cooperation and can be handled entirely by local and international NGOs. Everything from the construction of barrier walls for flood-prone areas to toilets for public schools and the repairing of hospital walls has proven difficult to fund because the perception is that this is “Taliban” infrastructure – not Afghan infrastructure that serves the people and should outlast any government in Kabul.
Whatever the crisis – from earthquakes and floods to mass expulsions from Iran and Pakistan – Afghans are taking it upon themselves to travel to places many had never been before to help.
This mentality is how we end up with media headlines about a so-called “Taliban highway” when referring to a government proposal to connect one of the most remote areas of the country to China. It also means that nearly 40 million people are in effect being deprived of basic services and potential job opportunities so foreign capitals can punish a few dozen men in the Taliban-led government.
No matter how they may feel about the Islamic Emirate, its policies (including social restrictions) or its human rights track record, Afghans themselves are realising that they have an obligation to help one another as the world turns its focus elsewhere – to the Trump tariffs, or to the genocide in Gaza and Israel’s regional aggressions.
This is what has impressed me most in my reporting on disasters: Whatever the crisis – from earthquakes and floods to mass expulsions from Iran and Pakistan – Afghans are taking it upon themselves to travel to places many had never been before to help. They are spending time in communities they had little previous interaction with and finding ways to gather and distribute assistance to those affected.
Think of the team of more than a dozen male and female doctors driving from Kabul to Gardez to assess what hospitals in earthquake-struck Paktika and Khost need in terms of supplies and expertise; or of the young men in Jalalabad who raised funds for quake victims in Herat, or of the dual national Afghans who bought winter firewood and a new school bus engine for a Kabul orphanage that serves more than 100 boys and girls from more than a dozen provinces.
I’ve reported on men and women who created unofficial home schools for women and girls to continue their studies, and on female NGO leaders who negotiated with local authorities so their female staff could continue to work (after the Ministry of Economy ordered all local and international NGOs to suspend their female staff in late 2022).
Not far from my home, a 17-year-old girl whose mother works as a cleaner and whose father is addicted to heroin teaches 10 neighbourhood girls English and Dari literacy at a rate of 100 afghanis ($1.44) a month. She then takes 500 afghanis of the 1,000 she makes to pay for a private English-language course that qualifies her to help teach her neighbour’s girls.
Local media has also featured stories of a female entrepreneur who has employed 20 other women in Bamiyan province with a 100,000 afghani ($1,500) investment, residents in Maidan Wardak province who self-funded the building of a 5.1 million afghani ($75,000) school and 6,000 women in Herat who are directly and indirectly engaging in commercial enterprises.
None of this is meant to be blind to the numerous restrictions on women and girls who, along with not being able to attend public school beyond the sixth grade are not legally allowed to go to beauty salons, public parks (including national parks) or gyms; and who are subject to potential punishment or detention for not wearing a “proper” hijab.
What it does show is that even with the restrictions, women and girls are still finding ways to go about their lives as much as possible under all the limitations.
This is why, as someone who has spent the majority of the last four years in the Islamic Emirate, I urge the global media to stop always pointing to impediments – both real and imaginary – and to finally start promoting and looking for solutions to Afghanistan’s problems.
Afghans, including women, are every day finding ways to open businesses and employ other women – even outside the major urban centres and amid numerous social restrictions.
It is especially disheartening to see headlines claiming “a female cat has more freedom than a woman” in Kabul or that “women must not be seen from neighbours’ homes”, while the Afghan people’s triumphs over adversity and restrictions consistently go unreported.
Downplaying achievements
Undeniably, major challenges still exist: The Committee to Protect Journalists continues to document cases of journalists being detained, including for something as benign as social media posts; approximately 85% of people live on less than a dollar a day; and a well-known education activist spent nearly seven months in prison on unclear charges.
But again, all of this is why there needs to be a focus on solutions and successes.
As of 2023, two thirds of unemployed Afghans were aged 15 to 29, but young Afghans continue to innovate.
Over the last three years, youth in Jawzjan and Kunduz and Maidan Wardak have come up with technologies to assist in farming, money exchange, and prosthetics. A young engineer in Kabul has also gained street cred for creating what is considered the first-ever Afghan made sports car. Cases like these back up the World Bank’s assertion that, in Afghanistan, “unemployed youth tend to be more educated than their employed peers”.
Just as bad is when a fairly standard security practice in New York, London, Hong Kong, Dubai, or Hyderabad – installing thousands of CCTV cameras across public areas and streets – is seen as especially nefarious just because it’s being done in Kabul.
Downplaying achievements, whether by the people themselves or the Islamic Emirate, while constantly playing up the challenges and limitations, does little to help the 22.9 million people the UN says are in need of assistance in 2025.
And to be fair, the Islamic Emirate has had its achievements.
Even with recent fluctuations, the afghani has become one of the most stable currencies in the region. Since 2022, more than 270 kilometres of new roads have been laid in Kabul. There are currently plans to build an additional 1,207 kilometres of roads across the country. Over the last four years, the Islamic Emirate has increased its domestic revenue to 280 billion afghanis ($4 billion) through customs, taxes, internal services, and mining regulations.
These achievements, however small they may seem, should be taken as a model. Rather than throwing billions of dollars of humanitarian aid money at the country, both the government and the people want the world to assist in development and to invest in Afghanistan and the capabilities of its people.
“An investment in stability”
The most high-profile case of investment came in January, when Mirwais Azizi, the Dubai-based Afghan real estate magnate, announced a $10 billion injection of funds into electricity and rail services in Afghanistan that was formalised at a ceremony in Kabul earlier this month.
In a statement to The New Humanitarian, Azizi said he views assistance to Afghanistan as a personal and patriotic matter: “Supporting the Afghan people is not just a moral imperative, it’s an investment in stability, dignity, and the potential of an entire generation.”
As part of his commitment to future generations, Azizi has pledged that 98% of the workforce for the project, which will span at least a dozen of the nation’s provinces, will be Afghan nationals.
If Azizi can hold true to his word, this commitment to putting Afghans to work will have a massive impact on a country that had already lost an estimated 700,000 jobs even before cost-cutting measures led the Islamic Emirate to shed tens of thousands of government jobs in April.
Governments and multinational businesses should look to Azizi’s focus on investment over aid as an example of how to assist the Afghan people, especially in light of the Trump administration’s gutting of USAID and the broader global cutback on foreign aid.
If the last three years of aid cuts have achieved anything, it is to bring the aid industry’s predatory and cyclical nature back to the fore.
Last month, a senior US official said the United States, which has been the largest funder of Afghanistan for more than 20 years, is tired of having “shouldered the burden of supporting the Afghan people with time, money, and, most important, American lives”.
That attitude is exactly why assisting Afghanistan needs to be reframed.
If the last three years of aid cuts have achieved anything, it is to bring the aid industry’s predatory and cyclical nature back to the fore. For decades, Afghanistan was one of the clearest examples of the dependency foreign aid breeds in a country.
Azizi acknowledged that his vast financial resources make him an outlier, but he insisted that making a difference in Afghanistan, especially at this time, shouldn’t be contingent upon your net worth. “Even without great means, anyone can contribute by giving time, sharing knowledge, or simply raising awareness,” he said. “True impact begins with empathy and the courage to act, however small the step.”
And Afghans with modest earnings compared to Azizi are looking for their own ways to assist the people and have a positive impact on the local economy. Sayara Peerzay has been matching Afghan donors in the US, where she is based, to needy families inside Afghanistan since 2015.
As a suburban wife and mother who doesn’t have millions of dollars at her disposal, the genesis of Peerzay’s work was admittedly much more humble, “I went for a visit to Kabul and a group of friends and family gave me some money to help the families in need.”
That trip led her to identify 12 families in need of financial support.
Since then, Peerzay has continued to expand her network, relying on family and friends in Kabul to find new needy families.
“They’re always on the lookout for people that seem in need of help,” Peerzay said. “Sometimes we’ve studied and tracked people for days, and once we feel they are in need, our team goes to visit them at home.”
Running the home visits and eventual distributions has allowed Peerzay to employ a small team, including two young women, who, given Afghanistan’s cultural constraints, are able to more easily conduct home visits than their male counterparts.
As of this year, this method has allowed them to match 135 families in the country with sponsors abroad.
“My entire overhead is $550 a month,” for a staff of five, she told me.
Cognisant of the economic challenges facing Afghans in the diaspora, Peerzay has found ways to stretch every dollar. “For $15, I can provide food to 15 people during Ramadan,” she said.
Peerzay pointed out that larger-scale projects with big impact don’t have to cost nearly as much money as people may think. Two years ago, she built a madrassa for women and girls, including solar panels, in a district of Kabul province for $1,900.
“People think you need to have millions and millions of dollars, but if you put in the effort, you can find ways to a lot with not much money,” she said. “Now, these women and their daughters learn about their religion and how to read. Most importantly, though, they’ve built a community. They’ve become friends who trade gossip, stories, jokes, and advice.”
Though she has conducted numerous one-off efforts like distributing meal kits with rice, meatballs, chips, and fruit to the capital’s day labourers, Peerzay has always tried to find a way to have her assistance be conducted in a manner “that is meaningful and promotes positive change” in the society.
This can be as simple as paying a local restaurant 12,000 afghanis ($175) to cook and pack 100 meal kits or buying rickshaws, carts, and wheelbarrows that will allow people to sell fruit, vegetables, and other basic goods, or offering the families of beggar children 2,000 afghanis ($30) a month to take their kids off the streets and enroll them in schools.
Most importantly, this personal connection has allowed her to personalise her approach to each case and to find ways to empower the beneficiaries. Peerzay uses an old man she met on her last trip to Afghanistan earlier this year as an example.
“He was begging on the streets with his son, I asked him, ‘Uncle, do you have any skills, something you can do for work.’ When he said he can cook, I said I will buy him a cart and pots so he can sell his rice on the streets,” a move Peerzay said cost her less than $200.
Eventually, the man had gained enough confidence from the cart that he asked Peerzay for help obtaining larger-scale cooking supplies so he could provide food for gatherings, funerals, and weddings in his community: “I was so happy, I said, ‘Of course, uncle.’”
The reason all these efforts – from billion-dollar private investment to finding employment opportunities for a few dozen women to $100 charity efforts – are so important is because the need in Afghanistan is still so great. Currently, 9.5 million people in the country are severely food insecure, 3.7 million children are out of school, and every 30 seconds a child returns to Afghanistan. All of them deserve solutions, no matter how small.
Four years of finger wagging has done little to change the situation: The Afghan people deserve real, sustainable assistance, not lectures and the same old short-term aid.
