UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – Norway is encouraging donors to a World Bank-administered fund for Afghanistan to agree to switch $280 million to the World Food Programme and UNICEF, Foreign Minister Anniken Huitfeldt mentioned on Monday.
The World Bank’s board backed transferring $280 million to the U.N. companies from the $1.5 billion Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF), which was frozen after the Taliban took over the Afghan authorities in August, Reuters reported final week.
The 31 donors to the fund should approve the switch. A World Bank spokesperson mentioned ARTF donors met final Friday and agreed to decide in a single week.
During a joint interview with U.N. Development Programme chief Achim Steiner in New York, Huitfeldt advised Reuters that she hoped donors would log off on the switch and that Norway “inspired” them to accomplish that.
“And we mentioned the state of affairs in Afghanistan in the course of the NATO assembly final week, and likewise encourage NATO international locations to proceed to keep away from a complete financial or humanitarian collapse in Afghanistan,” she mentioned.
Afghanistan is battling a pointy drop in worldwide growth assist after the Taliban seized energy, an financial system and banking system getting ready to collapse, the COVID-19 pandemic and extreme drought.
“If you can not have sufficient meals, you can not educate your kids, you can not get well being service for your loved ones, you haven’t any motive to dwell there anymore, you attempt to transfer on elsewhere,” Steiner mentioned.
The UNDP has projected that poverty might turn out to be almost common by mid-2022 – affecting greater than 90 p.c of Afghanistan’s 39 million individuals.
“We face this significantly intense interval between now and subsequent yr, the place many Afghans are on the verge of giving up,” Steiner mentioned.
A problem for the United Nations has been getting sufficient money into Afghanistan to assist ship assist to hundreds of thousands of individuals getting ready to famine and forestall the breakdown of the financial system and well being and schooling providers.
“The quantity of finance that wants to be, in a technique or one other, mobilized by Afghanistan, is way bigger than something the monetary system can address proper now. So we’re confronted with an unlimited constraint,” Steiner mentioned.
It’s an issue that hasn’t been solved but, Steiner mentioned.
He mentioned the United Nations was contemplating flying in U.S. {dollars}, however warned that would solely be a brief time period answer because it was “not the idea on which the scaling up of finance that’s wanted will occur.”
(Reporting by Michelle Nichols; enhancing by Grant McCool)
