By The Associated Press

Funding cuts to Afghanistan are the biggest threat to helping the country’s women, the chief of a top aid agency warned Sunday.

Jan Egeland, the secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, said women and girls were bearing the brunt of dwindling financial support for nongovernmental groups and humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan.

The NRC helped 772,484 Afghans in 2022. That number fell to 491,435 in 2023. Last year, the aid agency helped 216,501 people. Half of its beneficiaries are women.

Egeland, who has made several visits to Afghanistan since 2021, said: “We see one after the other peer organization cutting programming and staff in the last two years. The biggest threat to programs helping Afghan women is funding cuts. The biggest threat to the future well-being of Afghan women is (the lack of) education.”

The Taliban takeover in August 2021 drove millions into poverty and hunger after foreign aid stopped almost overnight.

Sanctions against the country’s new rulers, a halt on bank transfers and frozen billions in Afghanistan’s currency reserves have cut off access to global institutions and the outside money that supported the aid-dependent economy before the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces.

The U.N. and others have urged the international community to continue supporting the beleaguered country.

Organizations like the Norwegian Refugee Council have helped keep public services afloat through education and health care programs, including nutrition and immunization.

But women and girls face more obstacles in accessing health care and education because of restrictions imposed by authorities and an ongoing shortage of female medical professionals, also exacerbated by Taliban decrees.

Egeland said Afghan women and girls had not forgotten world leaders telling them their “number one priority” was education and human rights. “Now we can’t even fund livelihood programming for widows and single mothers,” he told The Associated Press by telephone from the western province of Herat.

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The international community provided humanitarian assistance in many countries where they disagreed with local policies. But opposition to Taliban policies, together with a “general starving” of aid funding in many countries, was worsening the shortfall in Afghanistan, he said.

Egeland said most of his discussions with Taliban officials on his trip were about the need to resume classes for women and girls. “They still argue that it will happen, but the conditions are not right,” he said. “They say they need to agree on what the conditions are.”