Insights
Afghan Women’s Confidence in UN’s Ability to Ensure an Improved Humanitarian Situation
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Summary
2,183 women from the provinces of Herat, Nangarhar, Balkh, Helmand, Takhar, Bamiyan, Kandahar, Daikundi, Panjshir, Jawzjan, Farah, Faryab, Badghis, Baghlan, Kunar, and Paktia were polled about the state of public services in their communities and to what degree improving women’s rights was as important as improving access to public services.
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Only 33% of respondents perceived any degree of improvement to public services in their communities over the last year. 37% reported public services were worsening while 30% reported “no difference”.
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29% of respondents said no essential public services were available to them at the time they were surveyed. Food was reported to be the most available public service according to 19% of respondents, with core health services and clean water access following at 16%.
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Most respondents said aid in their community was delivered by international actors, with 39% saying the UN was aiding their community while 35% said international NGOs were aiding their community. 19% said local NGOs were delivering aid while only 7% said the de facto authorities (the Taliban) were delivering aid to their communities.
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An overwhelming 81% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that women’s rights should be as important for the UN’s mission in Afghanistan as improving public services.
Data Explorer
Welcome to our Survey Data Explorer. Using Microsoft Power BI you can see the results of this month’s survey, and use the interactive controls to explore the data in more detail.
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Focus Group Discussion
FGD Recording - December 2022
Participants were asked their thoughts about the survey results and how they themselves would respond. FGD participants received somewhat different questions than the survey participants. Instead of survey question 4 (whether or not improving women’s rights should be as important for the UN as improving public services), FGD participants received two questions about the effects of the Taliban’s new ban on female NGO workers and how the current state of public services is impacting women.
Participants overwhelmingly agreed on the devastating decrease or complete disappearance of public services across provinces, especially for women and girls. While most respondents will say some measure of health services are still available, the lack of any staff, supplies, or equipment mean that health services are extremely limited and often only available to larger communities. One participant in Bamyan noted: “There are no doctors, midwives, and specialized personnel…The hospital does not provide medicine and the people must buy medicines from the market.” The four responses from Farah were somewhat more positive on the level of healthcare provided though they were an exception. One participant from Faryab says this about the current government’s provision of any kind of public service: “The Taliban government only plays the role of monitoring and giving orders. They do not play a role in providing public services.” Given that responses from question 4 overwhelmingly state either international organizations were providing the bulk of public services or that there were no public services to speak of, this response seems borne out in other provinces.
One response from Baghlan sums up many of the participants’ position on what essential services were most needed: “The first important needs of women are education and women’s right to work because 80% of women who are unemployed were the breadwinners of their families.” Healthcare was the other most given response to this question though some responses across provinces would mention the need for a functional and responsive justice system or any kind of basic infrastructure like electricity, water, and roads.
But the end of women being able to serve as breadwinners was a common refrain for almost all of the questions. Whenever possible, many FGD participants would bring up the devastating impact of the inability of women to provide for themselves and their families. The impact of this loss translates into increased poverty, domestic misery, and inability to properly feed a family. Psychological issues like depression and suicidal thoughts were also widely shared among responses across all provinces.
It is also frequently mentioned that unemployment is just as prevalent among men and that many families simply have no male provider who could have been the breadwinner anyway. One response from Daikundi on the impact of the lack of services and ability of women to care for themselves sums up this new pessimism: “The lack of public services has paralyzed the life of all citizens; they are only alive but not living.” One from Balkh says: “The recent order and restrictions from the Taliban on women’s work and education have brought people’s lives below the poverty line and this has caused an increase in youth violence and suicide.”
While the overwhelming majority named international organizations like the United Nations as the primary provider of public services, it is also frequently mentioned that these services are decreasing in availability or are already difficult to access. One participant from Herat observes: “International organizations are providing more services than the government. The existing services are not enough for the people because the areas far from the center of the city do not have access and the services are being offered based on relationships.”
This observation is not the only one that suspects this kind of bias in how the meagre services are being allocated. In Bamyan, a response observed that “the Taliban are trying to hire illiterate people and their relatives in various organizations such as public health, which lowers the quality of work.
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