WFP IN AFGHANISTAN

At the height of Afghanistan's civil war in the 1980s, thousands of women were drafted to fill vacancies left by men called up to fight.

By the early 1990s in Kabul, an estimated 70 percent of schoolteachers, 50 percent of government workers and 40 percent of doctors were women.

For much of the nineties, however, the Taliban turned its back on this skilled labour force. Afghan women were effectively banned from the workplace and, if single, granted limited access to food, water and shelter.

Now, as the National Afghanistan Interim Government lays the foundations for a better future, female teachers, civil servants, doctors and journalists like Saliha have a vital role to play in the rebuilding of their devastated country.

WFP's US$285 operation in Afghanistan includes a series of innovative food aid projects to help women re-establish themselves in Afghan society.

• In an unprecedented move, the agency has provided short-term food rations to civil servants, in particular women, to supplement their income and get the national civil service up and running again.
  
  
• Food aid has been given to women as an incentive for attending non-formal education.
  
  
• WFP has also expanded its long-running women's bakery projects.
  
  Even before the Taliban's collapse, these bakeries provided a lone exception to the strict Islamic ban on women working.
  
  Under this project, the agency supplies the flour that allows women, in particular, destitute war widows, to produce Afghanistan's traditionally flat bread at about one sixth of market price for women and children; it also provides the bakers with some kind of income.
  
  Over the past 12 months, WFP has consolidated 21 female-run bakeries in Kabul and another 20 in Mazar-I-Sharif, providing jobs for 160 women and 4,500 families and pioneered similar projects in other cities.
  
  

AFGHANISTAN COUNTRY BRIEF
For up-to-date information on WFP operations in Afghanistan, useful contacts, facts & figures, history of food aid, click here

• WFP has long believed that women play a key role in reducing hunger and poverty
  
  

• Experience shows that in the hands of women, food aid is far more likely to reach the mouths of hungry children
  
  
• So when WFP drafts new operations, women are top of its priority list
  
  
• In emergencies, food aid is increasingly distributed through women. Likewise women are recognised as having a crucial role in the recovery phase that follows a humanitarian disaster
  
  
• In 2001, WFP gave over half (52 percent) of its food aid to women
  
  
• The agency also ensures that 50 percent of food relief distributed through its school feeding programmes is given to girls
  
  In these "take-home ration" projects, WFP provides basic food items, like a sack of rice or a can of cooking oil, to families in exchange for sending their daughters to school
  
  These rations often compensate parents for the loss of their daughters' labour and enable girls to receive an education
  
  WFP's focus on girls has led to widespread success in increasing female attendance rates, in some schools by more than 300 percent