Medair

Afghanistan: The Road from Food Crisis to Food Security

Medair’s cash-for-work programme in Kohistan helps families meet their basic food requirements while “planting seeds” for the future.

“There has always been hunger here in the past years,” explained Fawad, a young mason from Paschud village in Kohistan district.

In this small far-flung district of Afghanistan’s remote Badakhshan province, mountains stretch as far as the eye can see. This is an empty land: barren and silent.

Scattered sparsely among Kohistan’s hills and mountains are small villages. Clusters of crude mud-brick homes stand on hillsides, usually near a river or stream.

These isolated communities face long winters, poor growing conditions, and high rates of malnutrition. The thin soils and steep slopes make for difficult farming, while heavy rains throughout the growing season lead to flooding and landslides.

At the end of 2009, an early snowfall cut the growing season short and left families without enough food or money to meet even a subsistence diet.

“For more than three years we have faced the problem of running out of money during the winter,” said Fawad. “People run out of money and can’t buy food.”

An Innovative Project
In 2010, Medair resolved to provide life-sustaining assistance to Fawad and more than 1,000  families in villages across Kohistan, with funding from the European Commission’s  Humanitarian Aid department. To do this, Medair proposed an innovative cash-for-work project that would provide both immediate and lasting benefits to residents of the region.
 
“We have a lot of problems,” explained Ahmad, a struggling farmer and father of six in Turchud village. “We don’t have any income... And we have a big problem with our roads being damaged.”

Indeed, Kohistan’s roads are often impassable, meaning that village residents can’t access essential services like health clinics or markets where they can buy or sell food.

And so, in consultation with village leaders, Medair launched a cash-for-work project to provide the longer term benefit of rehabilitated roads, while also paying local residents for their work on the road. As a result, residents earned the income they needed to bridge the food gap and feed their families.

Bridging the Food Gap
For six months, the men worked very hard on the roads. They worked without machinery, using wheelbarrows, donkeys, shovels, and pickaxes to build the road, while also sharing stories, laughing, and enjoying each other’s company. Communities became filled with enthusiasm and new-found hope because of the road project.

“This is not hard or boring work because we not only earn money but we are proud to be working for our village,” says Ahmad.

And today, roads that were barely fit for donkeys can now accommodate cars and trucks. “In the winter we could not pass here,” Ahmad explained while looking out over the road. “We have made a good road.”

More than 800 men have been able to earn an income from the roads. The project has also provided payments to help support 300 vulnerable households.

“Many people would have been in serious trouble, but now they are beneficiaries and so they won’t go hungry this year,” said Fawad.

Food for the Future
Medair also devised a longer term strategy to improve food security for Kohistan’s future. We developed a farmer training programme that is teaching farmers new techniques to enrich their harvests. Farmers like Emal, a father of seven, attended a training session and received fertiliser, vegetable seeds, and hand tools.

“We learned how to make compost,” said Emal. “We have learned to plant vegetables and we plant them in rows, which is useful for weed control and irrigation.”

Medair has also established 10 demonstration plots that showcase how farmers can protect soil and crops from landslides and erosion, plant trees, and manage water.

Farmers are enthusiastic about their new knowledge and hopeful for the coming harvest. “I hope to get enough harvest to feed my family for the whole year,” Emal said proudly.

This training will have immediate and lasting impacts. “I have started doing these things on my land and I have already noticed a big change because of the compost,” explained Emal. “I will teach my children what I have learned so that they will be ready when they become farmers also.”

“This is the first time anyone has come to teach us about agriculture.”

A New Outlook
In Kohistan, once isolated villages have new hope. In 2010, Medair directly helped more than 1,000 families to bridge the year’s food gap, while the new roads have opened up new opportunities for tens of thousands of people in the region. Trucks can now access the region with their winter rations, and families can more easily travel to the Paspul Bazaar, the main market in the district, where they can buy or sell food and other goods.

“Medair is the only one to help our village,” said Fawad. “I want to thank Medair and everyone who has helped us.”

Medair’s food security and cash-for-work programme in Kohistan district is funded by the European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid department, and private donations.

Medair has operated in Afghanistan since 1996 and is serving vulnerable and isolated communities in the provinces of Badakhshan and the Central Highlands. In addition to helping communities with clean water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH), Medair is providing nutritional support and training to malnourished women and children, helping improve the food security of at-risk communities by offering famer training and cash-for-work schemes, supporting communities through emergency response when natural disaster occurs, and working with local government to reduce the risk of damage from future disasters.

This web feature was produced with resources gathered by Medair field and headquarters staff. The views expressed herein are those solely of Medair and should not be taken, in any way, to reflect the official opinion of any other organisation.