The Appeal Without the Account

Every few weeks, a United Nations agency tells the world how many Afghans are hungry. On October 20, the UN’s humanitarian office warned that 19.2 million Afghans could face acute food insecurity this winter, and that funding cuts had already forced about a third of nutrition sites to close or suspend services.[1] Earlier this year, the same office reported that the 2026 response plan, which seeks $1.71 billion to reach 17.5 million of the 21.9 million Afghans in need,[2] was only 16 percent funded by early June.[3] The figures are specific, the warnings are urgent, and the need behind them is real. Nobody who has spent time with Afghan families this decade doubts it.

In 2011, as a student, I wrote my bachelor’s thesis on the socio-economic impact of foreign aid on Afghanistan after 2001. The hardest part was not the analysis but finding out where the money went: pledges far outran disbursements, and almost nothing in the public record showed where or how the money that did arrive was spent. Fifteen years later, the question is the same, and the Afghanistan Aid Tracker can now put a number on it.[4]

What the appeals do not contain is an account of what the last appeal bought. Since August 2021, donors have confirmed paying $8 billion into the humanitarian response. Kabul Institute’s new report, “Who Gets the Aid Money in Afghanistan,” followed that money through every public source donors and agencies have published, and found that only $721.9 million of it, 9.0 percent, can be traced past the first recipient. The other 91 percent drops out of public view at the first handoff. No agency publishes program-level spending for Afghanistan in any machine-readable public source. A further $1.42 billion across 316 payments went to recipients disclosed only as “Confidential.” And $12.04 billion in development finance, committed by the Asian Development Bank, EU institutions, the United States and the World Bank, carries no published payment data at all.[5]

None of this is evidence that money was stolen or wasted, and the report says so in plain terms.[6] A zero in its tables is a finding about disclosure. It means no public source reports the figure, which is a different thing from saying nothing was spent. The distinction matters because it defines the problem precisely. The aid system publishes, in considerable and repeated detail, how much Afghans need and how much is missing. It publishes almost nothing about what happened to the money that did arrive. A public that is asked to fund the next appeal has no way to judge the last one.

This asymmetry has consequences for the people the appeals describe. Funding for Afghanistan has fallen about 80 percent from its 2022 peak of $2.96 billion to $597.9 million this year, a partial year, even as the warnings grew louder.[7] When alarm becomes routine, donors tire of it, and an appeal that asks for trust without offering evidence gives every skeptical donor a reason to look elsewhere. Afghans pay for that skepticism. A mother in the Pamirs of Badakhshan, the deserts of Helmand, or the Dragon Valley of Bamyan has no say in how the money raised in her name is spent, nor does she have any stake in the argument about transparency. Yet she bears the whole cost when a reasonable question goes unanswered long enough to become a reason to give less.

There is also a structural reason the pattern persists, and it requires no bad faith to explain. The agencies that assess humanitarian need are the same agencies that receive the money to meet it. An organization whose budget depends on how pressing the picture looks will tend to communicate the most serious credible version of the facts, and will have little incentive to publish detailed accounts that invite scrutiny. That tension exists in every humanitarian crisis. In Afghanistan, where the political environment already limits independent monitoring, this effect is more pronounced because few outside actors can check the record.

The remedy is available and modest. Donors can make program-level expenditure disclosure a condition of future funding, with agencies publishing a quarterly accounting sufficient to show that money reached the intended activity, not only the first recipient. Where confidentiality protects beneficiaries or staff, recipients can still be classified by type and sector so the scale of undisclosed spending can be assessed. The paid-versus-committed reporting that already applies to humanitarian flows can be extended to development finance. And donors can set and publicly report against minimum direct-funding targets for Afghan organizations, which received just 0.3 percent of first-line funding directly,[8] consistent with localization commitments that many of the same donors have already made.[9]

Disclosure of this kind strengthens the case for funding Afghanistan, and it is not a new idea. The Marshall Plan, perhaps the most admired aid program in history, required every recipient government to publish full reports of its operations and to send quarterly reports to Washington on how the aid was used. The program also reported to Congress every quarter.[10] That is essentially what Afghanistan’s donors and agencies are being asked to do today, for humanitarian and development aid alike. An agency that can show what its last dollar delivered makes the next appeal far harder to dismiss, and a donor who can see the results has every reason to give again. The 21.9 million Afghans in need deserve both things the system currently provides only in part: a loud account of what they lack, and a quiet, checkable record of what was done about it. Afghans were told that help was coming, and they are entitled to know what became of it.

Shoaib Alami is Head of Partnerships at Kabul Institute, an Afghan-led policy and research organization. A development practitioner with more than 18 years of experience, he has led multimillion-dollar infrastructure and business projects in Afghanistan, the Middle East, and the United States, across sectors including transportation, energy, mining, and logistics. He holds an MBA in Management and Finance and wrote his bachelor’s thesis on the socio-economic impact of foreign aid on Afghanistan after 2001.

Endnotes

[1] Anadolu Agency, “Nearly 19.2M Afghans projected to face acute hunger this winter: UN,” 20 October 2026, quoting Olga Cherevko, spokesperson for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Afghanistan.

[2] OCHA, Afghanistan Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan 2026, December 2025: $1.71 billion sought, 21.9 million people in need, 17.5 million targeted. Also reported by KabulNow, “UN Seeks $1.71bn to Support Humanitarian Aid in Afghanistan in 2026,” 30 December 2025.

[3] OCHA Afghanistan post on X, 2 June 2026, reported in “OCHA: Afghanistan receives only 16% of required humanitarian funding,” Salam Watandar: 16 percent ($269 million) of the $1.71 billion requested.

[4] Kabul Institute, Afghanistan Aid Tracker.

[5] Kabul Institute, “Who Gets the Aid Money in Afghanistan” (data through 30 September 2026), [section and page numbers]. Figures: $8.00 billion confirmed paid; $721.9 million (9.0 percent) traceable past the first recipient; $1.42 billion across 316 payments to “Confidential” recipients; $12.04 billion in development finance across 1,208 projects with no published payment data.

[6] Kabul Institute, “Who Gets the Aid Money in Afghanistan,” [section on how to read zeros and disclosure gaps, page number].

[7] Kabul Institute, “Who Gets the Aid Money in Afghanistan,” [page], and Afghanistan Aid Tracker: payments of $2.96 billion in 2022 and $597.9 million in 2026 (partial year, through 30 September).

[8] Kabul Institute, “Who Gets the Aid Money in Afghanistan,” [page]: Afghan national and local NGOs received 0.3 percent ($32.6 million) of first-line funding directly, and a further $113.8 million through pooled funds.

[9] The Grand Bargain (World Humanitarian Summit, May 2016) commits to channeling at least 25 percent of humanitarian funding to local and national responders as directly as possible by 2020.

[10] Economic Cooperation Act of 1948 (Title I of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1948, Pub. L. 80-472), Section 115, on bilateral agreements. The Marshall Foundation’s summary says that participating countries agreed to prepare quarterly reports to the United States on operations and the use of funds, and that the President was required to submit a quarterly report on the program to Congress. See also The Marshall Plan and How It Works (Section 115 on publishing full reports of operations).