The executive board of the World Bank on Tuesday gave approval to use more than $1bn from a frozen Afghanistan trust fund to support education, agriculture, health and family programmes in crisis torn Afghan.
According to the World Bank, the move will bypass sanctioned Taliban authorities and disburse the money through United Nations agencies and international aid groups to ease the country’s worsening humanitarian and economic crises.
Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF) was frozen in August when the Taliban overran Kabul as the last United States-led international troops departed after 20 years of war.
Foreign governments ended financial aid constituting more than 70 percent of government expenditures while the US led in the freezing of some $9bn in Afghan central bank funds.
The funding cuts accelerated an economic collapse, worsening a cash crunch and deepening a humanitarian crisis that the United Nations says has pushed more than half of Afghanistan’s population of 39 million people to the verge of starvation.
The World Bank statement said that as a first step, ARTF donors will decide on four projects worth about $600m that will support “urgent needs in education, health and agricultural sectors, as well as community livelihoods”.
The Taliban has unraveled gains in rights made by women during the last two decades, including restricting them from working and limiting their travel unless accompanied by a close male relative.
