KABUL: Authorities have distributed China-donated humanitarian aid to forty-seven needy families in the northern Jawzjan province in Afghanistan, officials said.
According to Mawlawi Sirajuddin Siraji, Provincial Director for Natural Disaster Management and Humanitarian Affairs, the aid packages, including tents, rice, and winter clothes, were distributed in the provincial capital, Shiberghan city, on Saturday afternoon.
Over the past month, China has also provided food packages, including wheat and rice, to more than 800 needy families in western Nimroz and central Bamyan provinces.
In the past year, Beijing provided COVID-19 vaccines, tents, winter clothes, and foodstuff distributed among destitute, quake-hit and flood-affected families in the impoverished and war-torn country.
Afghanistan has been facing a severe humanitarian crisis after the US-led NATO forces withdrew from the country in August 2021.
Aid appeal
UN Deputy Special Representative and Humanitarian Coordinator for Afghanistan Dr. Ramiz Alakbarov recently appealed to the world not to abandon Afghan people at this precarious moment of humanitarian and economic crisis.
He said that Afghanistan is the world’s largest aid operation, with a record 28.3 million people in need of aid in 2023 and a humanitarian appeal of 4.6 billion dollars.
Even with twenty million of its people facing severe hunger and 6 million of them just one step away from famine, the appeal is less than 5% funded, having received only 213 million dollars to date.
Levels of moderate acute malnutrition in Afghan people are also the highest ever recorded in the country, with an estimated 4 million children and pregnant and breastfeeding mothers likely to suffer from acute malnutrition this year.
