Thank you, Mr. Chair and the committee, for the opportunity to appear before you.
For over 30 years the Afghan Women's Organization, AWO for short, has been providing settlement services to newcomers to Canada with a special focus on women, their families, refugees and people who have experienced war and persecution. AWO is also a sponsorship agreement holder and has successfully resettled over 5,000 refugees from around the world.
AWO is founded and led by Afghan women and is a staunch advocate for the human rights of Afghan women and girls. AWO has led several projects inside Afghanistan, including home-based and underground schools for Afghan girls as well as educational and income generation projects for women. Currently, AWO runs an all-girls orphanage in Kabul.
Since last summer AWO has supported Afghan refugees who have been evacuated to Canada, has sponsored vulnerable Afghan refugees to Canada, has provided support to vulnerable Afghans in Afghanistan and has also been engaged in many advocacy efforts.
We thank the Canadian government for its commitment to resettle 40,000 Afghan refugees and provide $50 million in humanitarian aid. This pledge reflects Canada's long-standing and continuous bipartisan support to ensure stability and respect for human rights in Afghanistan. Canada's investments have advanced tangible progress in the areas of health, education and women's and girls' rights. However, we are concerned that Canada's investments in Afghanistan are severely threatened due to the country's dire humanitarian crisis, which is fuelled by both a lack of response on the part of the international community and the Taliban's inability to be an inclusive and representative government for all its people.
The crisis inside Afghanistan is intensifying at an unprecedented rate. More than three and a half million Afghans are internally displaced, of which 80% are women and children, 23 million people are in desperate need of food and at least one million children are at risk of dying due to severe, acute malnutrition. Human rights are threatened with shrinking civic space. Women have been barred from working in certain sectors, their movement restricted, and higher education for women is uncertain. We are also concerned for women civil society activists who are being abducted and about gender-based persecution of women.
What is needed now is urgent action to protect those at risk and help address basic needs. Canada's humanitarian assistance objectives should ensure that aid gets to the most vulnerable by easing restrictions on getting funds to independent, trusted NGOs and multilateral organizations. They should have a long view that aid should be given in a way that opens up a pathway for reviving the economy and addressing development needs beyond preventing economic collapse. In line with Canada's feminist foreign affairs practices and international assistance policy, Canada should work with Afghans in the diaspora to centre the voices of Afghan women and local communities in the decisions about how resources will be disbursed.
Many donors have generously donated to emergency relief efforts to deliver food and other basic necessities; however, these short-term measures are not enough since this is not a natural disaster. Afghans find themselves at the intersection of four decades of war imposed on them, political and economic instability, corruption, widespread human rights abuses, a global pandemic, back-to-back droughts in the past four years and a harsh winter. Women and children have been at the front line and are disproportionally affected.
Afghanistan is also facing economic isolation and many Afghans have not been paid for months and lack essential services. The World Bank's Afghanistan reconstruction trust fund, a pool of aid to which Canada and other donors contributed, has unspent money that could be allocated immediately to health, education and other social services.
Some funding should be delivered to the public sector in areas such as agricultural support and village-level development programs. We should be empowering the local communities by providing them with the tools and resources they need to help themselves. They should be involved in the decisions about their needs and how the resources should be disbursed as well as community-based monitoring. To ensure that Afghans have the tools and resources they need, it is imperative that Canada increase its financial commitment to at least $100 million for 2022.
In addition to supporting the public sector, we need to alleviate the pressure on the private sector. Afghanistan needs a viable economy, because humanitarian assistance will never be sufficient or sustainable. A collapsing economy and extreme poverty will lead to another migration crisis as well as provide an opportunity for groups such as Daesh or ISIS-K to recruit people.
At-risk Afghans, particularly women, children and minorities, are in dire need of protection. Canada should remove the caps on the number of Afghan refugees that sponsorship agreement holders can sponsor, similar to what was done with the Syrian initiative.
Last, in parallel to these other efforts, there’s a need for continued political pressure on the Taliban to ensure there’s an inclusive and representative government that respects human rights and allows the people to define what they want for the future of Afghanistan.
Thank you again for the opportunity. I welcome any questions.
