Throughout the four decades Afghanaid has been delivering humanitarian and development programming in Afghanistan, we have been at the forefront of implementing innovative and holistic projects that meet project participants' immediate needs, whilst also setting them up with skills for the future and ensuring sustainable development for their communities and environments.
One of the key areas where Afghanaid has delivered innovation is livelihood generation: by supporting families to gain new income-generating activities, such as beekeeping and indoor mushroom farming, they can better address their basic needs, whilst also engaging in work that benefits their wider community.
Beekeeping has been part of Afghanaid's projects since 1999.
Indoor mushroom farming.
These projects focus on providing rural families with alternative sources of income, which are crucial considering many traditional agriculture livelihoods – on which 80% of the Afghan population rely – have been severely disrupted in recent years by drought, floods, and economic instability.
For decades, we have sought to innovate at the community-level, engaging local actors in natural resource management and disaster risk reduction programmes on a scale never before seen in the country.
Afghanaid was one of the first organisations to implement community-based natural resource management across Afghanistan, enabling communities to play a key role in stewarding local land and ensuring the fair distribution of resources.
Afghanaid also piloted Community-based Disaster Risk Reduction, which was then taken up by the World Bank in the design of the Citizens’ Charter National Priority Programme, highlighting the effectiveness of the programme and its relevance in other areas of the country.
As part of our work leading the Afghanistan Resilience Consortium, the large-scale Disaster Risk Reduction project ‘Strengthening the Resilience of Afghanistan’s Vulnerable Communities against Disasters’ was the first of its kind to be implemented at the community level, and supported approximately 400,000 people across some of Afghanistan’s most disaster-prone provinces.
Furthermore, Afghanistan faces significant environmental challenges, in part due to the far reaching impacts of climate change. Innovative climate initiatives like solar dishes for cooking. Solar dishes harness the abundant sunlight to provide clean and sustainable energy for cooking, reducing the reliance on fossil fuels and deforestation for firewood, whilst also keeping families safe from toxic household pollution.
A woman cooking with solar dishes which reduces the reliance on fossil fuels and defosteration for firewood.
By promoting renewable energy sources, these initiatives not only combat climate change but also enhance resilience.
