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A rapidly urbanizing world presents both challenges and opportunities for humanitarian aid approaches. Urban areas often have a greater density of people and diversity of affected populations, stronger civil society, and more developed and complex governance structures, service delivery systems, and market systems. These factors heighten the importance of coordination and collaboration.

Modernizing Humanitarian Assistance

Every dollar you donate to the ̽»¨¾«Ñ¡ powers life-saving humanitarian aid, creating a global ripple effect that transforms lives.

This World Humanitarian Day, we honor those who have dedicated their lives to helping those in need.

Learn the meaning of famine, what causes it, and how we can prevent future famines through early action and humanitarian aid.

This interactive experience supports people working in development and humanitarian aid to design effective programs.

In Afghanistan, state failure and economic collapse are now the primary drivers of a humanitarian catastrophe unfolding at breakneck speed. Unemployment and poverty are now the greatest drivers of internal displacement. The ̽»¨¾«Ñ¡ (̽»¨¾«Ñ¡) has been providing assistance in Afghanistan for three decades, working today in 11 provinces. We see firsthand that while humanitarian aid saves lives, it cannot replace a functioning economy and state. To date, the US and other Western governments have focused on providing humanitarian funding based on a famine prevention strategy, putting in place important humanitarian exemptions and offering much-needed clarity on sanctions regimes at the bilateral and multilateral levels. These steps helped avert the immediate threat of famine this past winter and have led to marginally improved food security projections over the coming months. The carveouts and clarity enabled agencies like the ̽»¨¾«Ñ¡ to scale up lifesaving humanitarian assistance across Afghanistan, including districts that had long been inaccessible to humanitarian agencies. However, the crisis in Afghanistan is evolving into a catastrophe of choice as these same governments maintain policies of economic isolation that are pushing the Afghan economy to the brink and causing nearly 19m Afghans to experience high levels of acute food insecurity in the coming months. Access to Afghanistan’s foreign reserves remain frozen, the banking system grounded, and development assistance, which financed most government services, on pause. The impact has been swift and catastrophic for ordinary Afghans, compounding an already dire economic and humanitarian situation. The international community can and should do much more to safeguard the lives and livelihoods of innocent Afghans, with action on the economy urgently needed. Recommendations for immediate actions to support public service delivery and the humanitarian response, as well as steps needed towards international engagement in support of the Afghan economy, are included in this report.

Humanitarian parole offers a pathway to safety for people in crisis and benefits the U.S. Learn more about how it works.