Afghanistan Field Visit Report
Resilience Building for Children and Families (RBCF), Sida project 17705
Project period October 2025 – September 2028
10–20 September 2026 | Kabul – Herat – Badghis
1. Purpose and Background
This field visit forms part of War Child Sweden’s (WCS) oversight of the Sida-funded Resilience Building for Children and Families (RBCF) project, implemented by War Child Alliance Foundation Afghanistan (WCAF Afg) and WASSA in four districts of Badghis province, Western Afghanistan: Qala-e-Naw, Qadis, Moqur and Abkamari. Under the project’s governance structure, WCS conducts monitoring visits twice a year, with oversight provided by a Supervisory Committee and a Technical Committee (see below). A monitoring visit planned for February was cancelled due to the security situation in Afghanistan at the time.
The field visit took place from 10 to 20 September 2026 and covered Kabul, Herat and Badghis. The programme included security briefings, meetings with War Child staff and partner organisations, visits to community and protection committees, engagement with government authorities (the Governor’s office), the provincial Departments of Refugees and Repatriation (DoRR) and Economy (DoEc), and the Ministries of Refugees and Repatriation (MoRR) and Economy (MoEc) and coordination with fellow INGOs operating in the country.
The WCS delegation consisted of:
- Ranjani Srinivasan, Managing Director, War Child Sweden
- Sofie Holmström, Institutional Funding Account Manager, War Child Sweden
Project Supervisory Committee:
- WCAF Afg Country Director
- WASSA Director
- WCS Managing Director
Project Technical Committee:
- WCS Grants Manager
- WASSA Head of Programme
- Child Protection Advisor
- Climate Resilient Livelihood Advisor
- WASSA Programme Manager
- WCAF Afg Senior Manager Programme and Partnership
- WCAF Afg Senior Manager Fundraising and Grants
2. Context: Badghis
War Child’s Programming Rationale in Badghis, Afghanistan
The province is wholly dependent on rainfall for agriculture and drinking water, with no irrigation infrastructure to counteract climate deterioration. Recurrent, worsening drought, compounded by the loss of over half the region’s pistachio woodland, has destroyed livelihoods, killed livestock and pushed food insecurity to crisis levels. Nearly half of the population is highly food insecure. Child protection risks abound, along with continued displacement in search of livelihoods. Badghis is among the hardest-hit provinces in Afghanistan, and children’s access to education, protection systems and stable family structures is heavily compromised.
Since Sweden’s development cooperation strategy with Afghanistan expired on 31 December 2025, and Afghanistan is not a priority country for a new country strategy, Sida’s engagement now runs through its humanitarian assistance channel. Afghanistan remains one of Sida’s largest humanitarian recipients in 2026, prioritising people most in need of clean water, nutrition, food, health care and protection. Within this context, War Child’s work in Badghis addresses the intersection of climate-driven displacement, food insecurity and child protection.
3. Context: The RBCF Project
The RBCF project runs from October 2025 to September 2028 with a total grant amount of SEK 17,834,883, and targets four districts in Badghis province: Qala-e-Naw, Qadis, Moqur and Abkamari. A needs assessment conducted by WCAF Afg and ActionAid Afghanistan in September 2024 across Herat, Badghis, Ghor and Bamyan provinces identified critical protection issues. This includes violence, child marriage, discrimination against children within the family, child labour, illegal migration, sexual exploitation, trafficking and gender-based violence. The assessment also highlighted that girls face particularly limited access to relevant protection and support services. UN Women reporting cited in the assessment found that 28.7% of women aged 20–24 were married before age 18 (9.6% before age 15), and that 68% of respondents knew at least one woman or girl who had suffered from anxiety or depression.
RBCF responds to this context through a community-led, participatory model: mapping and strengthening Community-Based Structures (CBSs), representative of women, men, youth and vulnerable groups, so that they can identify their own priorities, lead child protection and climate-resilient livelihood initiatives, and hold humanitarian actors and authorities to account. The strategic objective is to build resilience among post-conflict and climate-affected children, caregivers and marginalised households in the Western region through child protection, livelihood support and civil society strengthening.
4. Context: Female Staff and the Mahram Requirement
Female humanitarian staff across Afghanistan have operated under severe restrictions since 24 December 2022, when the de facto authorities’ Ministry of Economy ordered all national and international NGOs to suspend their female employees. The order was issued in a letter to the sector’s NGO coordinating body and threatened to revoke the operating licences of organisations that did not comply. The ban was later extended to UN agency staff in April 2023. Before the ban, women made up roughly 40% of NGO staff in Afghanistan, and for around 70% of them this was their family’s main source of income, so the ban immediately affected both service delivery and household livelihoods.
Where organisations have been able to resume work with female staff, this has generally depended on compliance with the mahram requirement: women must be accompanied by a male family member as chaperone when working outside the office, particularly in field-based roles, which are often exactly the roles that involve meeting communities, assessing needs and identifying protection risks.
In practice, the requirement ties up a male relative as an unpaid escort and, where no relative is available, can force a woman to leave her job altogether, which particularly affects women without an available male relative, such as widows. A sector-wide survey covering 122 organisations across Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, conducted in June 2026, found that 61% of organisations require female staff to travel with a male guardian on work-related journeys, and that organisations are absorbing rising costs to keep women in the workforce, including additional spending on mahram escorts, transport and separate workplace facilities.
For the RBCF project specifically, this national context is reflected as a named risk in the project’s risk register: restrictions on women’s participation and employment may limit the movement of female staff and beneficiaries within the project area. The agreed mitigation rests on three measures: close coordination with government authorities and community elders to secure local acceptance for female staff movement; prioritising local recruitment, so that mahram arrangements are easier to sustain within the same community; and mahram accompaniment where required, so that female staff can continue to travel and work in the field.
As of the June 2026 progress update, WASSA had put this into practice by onboarding one male and one female Project Officer and recruiting several field-facing roles as couples. As of the visit, all couple-recruitment positions (Protection Facilitator, Social Organizer and Livelihood Facilitator) have been filled, so that the female half of each pair can work alongside her mahram while both contribute to project delivery. This mirrors a broader adaptive approach used by WCAF Afg and WASSA since the 2022–23 restrictions, alongside community-based recruitment and adapted facilities to support continued female participation.
5. Kabul – Arrival and Staff Engagement
WCS arrived in Kabul on the morning of 10 September. Following a welcome and security briefing with the WCAF Afg Senior Manager Operations & Support, WCS met with Kabul-based staff and with members of both the Supervisory Committee and the Technical Committee for the RBCF project.
6. Herat and Badghis
On 11 September, WCS travelled from Kabul to Herat together with the WCAF Afg Senior Manager Programme and Partnership, the WCAF Afg Senior Manager Fundraising and Grants and the WCAF Afg Senior Manager Operations & Support. The delegation arrived at the Herat office and guesthouse around midday, where it received a welcome and security briefing covering Herat and Badghis and planned the field visits for the following days.
On 12 September, the delegation, together with colleagues from the Kabul office and War Child’s Manager, Safeguarding & Integrity in Afghanistan, made the four-hour drive to Badghis. The Manager, Safeguarding & Integrity is a female staff member who supported the visit to female beneficiaries; mahram arrangements were in place for her during the field visits.
6.1 Government Meetings
During the visit, WCS met with the Governor of Badghis as well as representatives of the Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation (MoRR) and the Ministry of Economy (MoEc) in Kabul. WCS attended each meeting together with male WCAF Afg colleagues.
The aim of each meeting was to share general observations from the visit, reaffirm the existing Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) and War Child’s permission to provide humanitarian programming in the country, and reaffirm War Child’s right to employ female staff. In each meeting, the authorities reconfirmed the MoU, under which they have approved the employment of female staff on the project. In the meeting with the Governor of Badghis, it was also confirmed that female staff can travel safely across the province to deliver project activities.
6.2 Partner, Community and Protection Committee Visit
Progress on RBCF at a glance (as of the visit):
- 54 communities assessed → 45 selected → 10 CBSs established
- 45 communities selected across Qala-e-Naw and Moqur
- 10 CBSs established in Qala-e-Naw
- 150 CBS members mobilised: 80 male / 70 female
- CBSs are designed to provide inclusive representation of women, men, youth and vulnerable community groups
- Community selection in Qadis is scheduled to commence, followed by Abkamari
During the field visit, the delegation met with two committees, in Cheshma Sanjed and Jaqa Roshan, out of the 10 established CBSs. The delegation was joined by WCAF Afg’s Badghis-based Child Protection Advisor and Climate Resilient Livelihood Advisor. In both villages, the delegation met directly with CBS representatives and discussed their understanding of roles and ownership within the RBCF approach; how community priorities are identified and translated into action; representation and inclusion of diverse community groups; local capacity and leadership; early experience (what is working, what challenges CBSs face and what support they need); and how CBSs can contribute to sustainable, locally led child protection and resilience action.
Vulnerable, hard-to-reach communities
The journey itself illustrated the isolation of these communities: there is no functioning road, and the further the delegation travelled, the less vegetation and livestock it saw. Distance from essential services was a recurring theme in the committee discussions. The closest school and health facility are far from the villages, and committee members described it as common for people to die on route to hospital, whether travelling on foot or, at best, by donkey. As an example, they cited mothers who have died of childbirth complications while on the way to hospital.
Inclusive, engaged committees
The committees showed a strong readiness to be part of the solution rather than passive recipients of aid. One community leader stated that if the project supported the first 25%, the community could manage the remaining 75% on its own. Members also demonstrated a clear awareness of how the community’s challenges are interconnected, for example how water and food scarcity drive negative coping mechanisms such as violence, child protection concerns and child marriage.
Village Mapping Exercise
As part of the project, each committee is asked to carry out a village count/mapping exercise, capturing:
- Total village population
- Women-led households
- Child-led households
- Number of children
- Number of families
- Persons with disabilities
- Returnees from Iran
This exercise gave the committees, and the delegation, an overview of who lives in the village: its composition, vulnerabilities and household structures. In one of the villages visited, the count showed an estimated population of around 720 people.
Women’s Committee
The women’s committee included young unmarried women, pregnant women and elderly women.
The committee was candid that the scale of need in the community is far greater than the RBCF project, with its SEK 17,834,883 budget, can address alone. Members explained that they understood the project could not solve everything, but that the process of meeting and discussing their challenges together had already been valuable in itself, both by helping them articulate their needs and by opening the possibility that other NGOs might contribute, or that they could learn how to advocate for government support on issues beyond the project’s scope.
The committee also spoke about the psychosocial support the group had already provided to its members and explained that, from their very first meeting, they had established a Child Friendly Space with a volunteer from the community. The delegation visited this space during the field visit.
Men’s Committee
The committee included representation from elders, alongside the following voices and concerns:
Disability: Members raised concern over a rising number of children born with congenital disorders, which they suspect may be connected to malnutrition.
A child’s voice: One boy on the committee explained that he had spoken with his friends, who wanted a safe space of their own. He described how he already uses the committee’s child protection function to raise the issue of youth needing to attend school, and how the committee has helped by speaking with families who have asked their children to stay home instead.
Young men and migration to Iran: Young men in the community feel compelled to travel to Iran for work, despite the danger of the journey and the risk of extreme physical abuse if caught. Most have attempted the crossing; the committee’s two youth representatives said they had each tried five times.
Inspiration for the project
In the afternoon, WCS met Laila in Qala-e-Naw, an example of how a CBS from a previous War Child project has been sustained after the project itself had run its course. War Child now only provides support if safeguarding issues arise.
Laila, a young girl in her community, identified the need for a safe space for children to stay while their parents are working and, together with her mother, created one in their home with support from the local CBS. It started with 10 children when the project was being implemented in 2024 and had grown to 35 children by the time of the visit. This space is separate from the Child Friendly Space established by the women’s committee, described above.
Laila’s safe space follows War Child’s Child Friendly Spaces (CFS) methodology, the same approach used across War Child’s community-based programming in Afghanistan. CFS are a widely recognised first response to children’s needs in emergencies, designed to mobilise communities around the protection and wellbeing of all children, including the most vulnerable, and to give children structured opportunities to play, socialise, learn and express themselves in a safe, supportive environment.
Volunteers such as Laila receive training grounded in five core principles: taking a coordinated, multi-sectoral approach; using the space to mobilise the wider community; keeping it inclusive and non-discriminatory; ensuring it is safe and secure; and making it stimulating and participatory. In practice, this translates into a structured two-hour session format (welcome, physical activities, learning games, and space for children to speak, followed by a closing routine), clear safety standards (registered attendance, a designated emergency gathering point, safe distance from traffic, no weapons), and guidance on how adults should communicate with children: staying sensitive to the child’s pace, avoiding pressure to discuss difficult experiences, and following the Code of Conduct and Child Safeguarding Policy at all times.
This training is also what enables War Child to step back into a purely supportive role once a CBS-run space, like Laila’s, is established and sustained by the community itself. The CFS approach is explicitly designed to build local ownership and capacity from the outset, so that community volunteers can continue running the space independently, with War Child remaining available if safeguarding concerns arise.
6.3 All-Staff Meeting and Partner Office Visit
Following the field visit, all RBCF project staff met to discuss key observations and recommendations going forward. Separately, the WCS delegation held a meeting with female staff, in line with the applicable requirements in Afghanistan.
WASSA, the local partner, also hosted the delegation at its office to meet staff and discuss the project, in particular governance and child protection.
7. Kabul – Coordination with INGO Country Directors
On 19 September, War Child hosted a dinner meeting at its Kabul office for country directors and senior representatives of international NGOs operating in Afghanistan. The event provided an opportunity for cross-agency exchange on the operating environment and coordination among INGOs.
WCS key takeaways on the Afghanistan context:
- Prioritise long-term development alongside humanitarian aid. Long-term support builds local ownership, resilience and positive norm change, and should centre children’s rights and women-led organisations.
- Strengthen women’s role as both providers and recipients of aid. Support women’s economic activity through livelihoods, vocational training and small business support, and channel aid from women to women.
- Increase access to education. Invest in the education that is still permitted and working, including alternative learning options for girls beyond grade 6.
- Support climate adaptation. Afghanistan is among the most climate-vulnerable and least prepared countries, so funding for sustainable agriculture, water management and local preparedness is key.
- Pursue principled dialogue with moderate actors within the de facto authorities on women’s and girls’ rights and humanitarian access, ideally in coordination with like-minded countries in the region, since full isolation would worsen the situation for the population.
Note: The names of individuals referred to in this report have been changed to protect their identity.