Over 6 lakh Afghans displaced by conflicts this year: UN

More than 634,000 Afghans have been displaced internally by conflicts in 2021, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Afghanistan said Thursday.

Around 634,800 people had been verified as having been displaced by conflicts as of September 12 this year, out of which 282,246 displaced people had received assistance, the agency said in a report.

Afghan officials and humanitarian agencies have expressed concern over the living condition of the displaced families in the country since it affected the lives of women and children as they do not have access to health facilities and schooling.

More than 28,000 Afghans have been also affected by natural disasters across Afghanistan starting this year, according to the OCHA.

Tuesday, the UN appealed to the countries pledging $1.2 billion in relief for Afghanistan to take action quickly.

Afghanistan is teetering on the brink of "universal poverty," which could become a reality in the middle of next year unless urgent efforts are made to bolster local communities and their economies, the UN development agency said recently.

It said the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan has put 20 years of steady economic gains at risk.

The UN Development Programme outlined four scenarios for Afghanistan following the Taliban's August 15 assumption of power that predict the country's total economic output will drop between 3.6 per cent and 13.2 per cent in the next fiscal year starting in June 2022, depending on the intensity of the crisis and how much the world engages with the Taliban.

That is in sharp contrast to the expected 4 per cent growth in GDP before the fall of the government.

"Afghanistan pretty much faces universal poverty by the middle of next year," Kanni Wignaraja, UNDP's Asia-Pacific director, told a news conference on September 9. "That is where we are heading – it is 97-98 per cent (poverty rate) no matter how you work these projections."

Kanni added: "Afghanistan now faces a humanitarian and development disaster resulting from political instability, frozen foreign reserves, a collapsed public finance system, a crush on local banking because of this, as well as the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic."