Afghanistan > Activities by Sectors
Health and Nutrition
Women and children in Afghanistan desperately need improved health care.
At the turn of the millennium, Afghanistan’s health system had been virtually destroyed. Most health professionals had fled the country during the Soviet occupation and civil war, and medical training programmes had ceased.[6] Although Afghanistan’s health system is slowly being rebuilt—by 2010, more than two-thirds of the population had access to some form of heath care—the health needs of women and children, particularly those living in rural communities, remains critical.[7]
Eleven Afghan children under five die every half hour.[8] One in five Afghan children will die before the age of five—that’s the second highest under-five mortality rate in the world.[9] Acute malnutrition is a leading contributor to the high death rate.[10] The districts of Yawan, Raghistan, and Kohistan have some of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world, with an estimated 65 women dying from pregnancy-related causes per 1,000 live births.[11] Most of these women and children live in remote villages in Afghanistan, enduring poor nutrition, limited health care, and long winters during which they are unable to travel to clinics or medical facilities.
Emergency Relief
Medair is committed to assisting acutely and severely malnourished women and children. Working in the districts of Raghistan, Kohistan, and Yawan, Medair offers emergency relief to malnourished mothers and children by providing special nutrient-rich supplementary food. Medair is integrating nutrition activities into the existing health care clinics to promote sustainable nutritional care.
Rehabilitation
Women in a clinic in Afghanistan
Working in cooperation with the Ministry of Public Health, Medair is helping local health clinics in Raghistan, Kohistan, and Yawan to increase their capacity to care for malnourished women and children. Furthermore, Medair nutrition promoters and a large group of community volunteers visit communities at the household level every two or three weeks throughout the region, presenting messages related to good nutrition and clean household environments.
Working with community mobilisers and nationally recruited hygiene promoters in both Bamyan and Badakhshan provinces, Medair presents key health and hygiene messages to communities with the purpose of encouraging people to think how their actions can make their environment healthier and cleaner and giving beneficiaries the information they need to improve their own health and well-being.
WASH
In 2007, Afghanistan was listed as the worst place in the world for sanitation, and the second worst for the number of people who had access to clean drinking water.[12,13] With more than one-quarter of all deaths of children under the age of five being caused by diarrhoeal disease, improving access to clean drinking water, and addressing sanitation and hygiene needs for remote communities remains imperative.[14]
Rehabilitation
In recent years, Medair WASH projects have assisted hundreds of villages scattered throughout the provinces of Bamyan and Badakhshan. Our current WASH project is assisting thousands of people in rural Afghanistan with clean water, improved sanitation, and hygiene training. Medair remains committed to working in the WASH sector, and hopes to expand its work into other unsupported areas in Badakhshan and Bamyan.
Shelter & Infrastructure
A lack of basic infrastructure means many communities in remote Afghanistan have limited access to heath facilities and markets. Despite the construction or rehabilitation of more than 9,000 kilometres of road in rural Afghanistan in the past ten years,[15] many villages remain virtually inaccessible, particularly during the long winter months. Frequent natural disasters, particularly landslides and floods, regularly destroy what little infrastructure exists and further isolate these vulnerable communities.
Rehabilitation
To help communities recover from natural disaster, Medair frequently employs cash-for-work schemes. Projects include: building or repairing roads; restoring flood-damaged land and irrigation systems; and constructing retaining walls and diversion dams. These projects allow households to earn a livelihood, while improving the infrastructure of the local community.
In both Bamyan and Badakhshan provinces, Medair cash-for-work projects have allowed disaster-affected families to buy food, while working on projects that improve their community’s access to health facilities and markets. Furthermore, the construction of retaining walls and diversion dams helps guard against future landslides and floods, increasing the disaster readiness of the community.
__________________________________________________________________________________
[6]Library of Congress – Federal Research Division – August 2008.
lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/profiles/Afghanistan.pdf
[7]The United Nations, Economic and Social Council. April 2010.
www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cescr/docs/E.C.12.AFG.Q.2-4.Add.1.doc
[8] Levels and Trends in Child Mortality, Report 2011. UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation: www.unicef.org/media/files/Child_Mortality_Report_2011_Final.pdf
[9 UNICEF state of the world’s children 2011.
www.unicef.org/sowc2011/pdfs/UNDER-FIVE%20MORTALITY%20RANKINGS_12082010.pdf
[10]World Food Programme.
www.who.int/disasters/repo/7543.doc
[11]UNDP Afghanistan. Retrieved in September 2011.
www.undp.org.af/MDGs/goal5.htm
[12]State of the World's Toilets 2007 report
[13]UNDP Human Development Index 2007-2008.
hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR_20072008_EN_Complete.pdf
[14]WHO Statistics 2011. www.who.int/whosis/whostat/EN_WHS2011_Full.pdf
[15]UNOPS, 2009. Retrieved in September 2011. www.unops.org/english/whatwedo/Locations/Europe/afghanistan-operations-centre/AGOC-news/Pages/Rural-roads-connect-villages-to-the-world.aspx
