Messed up funding priorities: where is the money for women?

Billion's of dollors of Aid coming in, yet we cant find the resources to Help Torpikai and thousands of others like here!

You will give us millions to spend on infrastructure, yet not what we need to keep Torpikai and her children and all the other widows off the streets

These are some screwed up funding priorities.

Kieran Green is the Communications Manager for CARE Canada. He is currently in Kabul, Afghanistan, gathering stories about the Afghan women CARE is working to empower. This is a piece that he wrote

Today was my first chance to get out into Kabul and meet some of the women CARE works with in Afghanistan. I’ll get to meet many more over this week and next, and I hope to hear many stories of success – women who have found livelihoods, education, health and empowerment with a hand from CARE. But today the stories were different. They weren’t stories of success. They were stories of need, and desperation.

Today, out in the impoverished districts of Kabul, I met two women: Torpikai and Khatam Jan.

Torpikai fled her native province of Logar, one of the most dangerous provinces in Afghanistan. She spends every day looking after her ill and elderly mother and mother-in-law, her sister-in-law who is both physically and mentally ill, and their six children. The children don’t go to school. She can’t afford the fees. The neighbours give them old clothes. The wearable pieces she uses for her family, the rest she burns for heat. She bakes bread for the neighbours to earn a meager income. With all the family to look after, there’s no way she can ever leave the house to find other work.

Khatam Jan lost a leg to a land mine, and her husband to a bullet, in the violence that tore apart Kabul in the 1990s. Once she did laundry for neighbours to earn a meager income to support her son and four daughters, but today she is too old to work. Her son is in grade 10, and can only afford the school fees by finding and selling plastic bags in the street. There’s no money left for the rest of the family.

What both women have in common is their only source of food: CARE’s HAWA program (Humanitarian Assistance for the Women of Afghanistan). Since 1994 CARE has been providing basic staples – wheat, beans, oil and salt – for thousands of vulnerable Afghan widows. Those distributions have been funded since the beginning by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).

Over the years the HAWA program has been the mother for a host of other programs that help women move beyond dependence on food aid to sustainable lives and livelihoods. CARE is proud that a majority of women have ‘graduated’ from food aid to better lives. Unfortunately there will always be a small number – women like Torpikai and Khatam Jan – who because of illness, disability, age or circumstance will likely be dependent for their entire lives.

Even more unfortunate, it now seems the funding for the HAWA program will soon run out. Unless CARE can find a new donor, the food distributions will end. For the women like Torpikai and Khatam Jan this will be a disaster. They don’t know how they will survive. Torpikai says she will pray, and probably send her children out to beg. As for Khatam Jan, she just doesn’t know.

 The funding for this work ends Next month. What is going to happen to these women? where is the commitment of the international community?

 

 

 

Afghanistan enters the world of International one day cricket

India v/s Afghanistan, Afghanistan's Debut match in International Cricket, dont know who I want to win more, wish both could and they were not in the same group! Cheering Noor Ali's first few boundaries. Cheering Noor Ali’s 50!

India win by 7 wickets. My star from the afghan side was Noor Ali.

1st May 2010

Thank you Sarah

Have been grinning since I saw the message you left on my board. It helps deal with the stress of figuring out if one will have a program left by the end of the year, with donors not interested in women's empowerment but visible infrastructre! The hypocracy of it all. A few words that come to mind about the injustice of it all , but those are only for my private venting and not a public space like this. The whole donor scene is going to be a subject of another entry soon! Inshallah

CARE Afghanistan's version of Goldilocks and the Three Bear's

Its been a long time since I wrote a Blog entry, the last few months have been filled with proposals, budgets, log frames, staff retrenchment, hiring, attacks on schools and a thousand things that seem to happen at the same time and requires one’s immediate attention.

But what got me out of my blogging lethargy was what was happening outside my office window today and I just had to go out take pictures and write this before I can get back to work!

It was CARE Afghanistan’s own version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, so here it is Ahad trying to figure out which one is ‘just right’ for him! Without further ado I will let you look at the pictures and see for yourself.