The UN humanitarian aid officer will travel to Afghanistan to meet with the Taliban

Dec. 30 (EUROPA PRESS) –

The head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance (OCHA), Martin Griffiths, will soon travel to Afghanistan to meet with the Taliban government and discuss the ban on women in non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

“The UN Emergency Assistance Coordinator will make a visit to Afghanistan in which he will seek to meet with the highest officials to resolve the situation,” said the UN Resident Coordinator in Afghanistan, Ramiz Alakbarov, during a press conference. at the New York headquarters this Thursday.

Alakbarov has detailed that the visit will last several hours and is scheduled for the coming weeks.

Griffiths will attend with the intention of a dialogue to resolve “the bottleneck in the delivery of vital assistance” caused by the ban on women working with non-governmental and international organizations, the UN agency said in a statement.

Right now, relief agencies are still assessing the impact of the Taliban’s latest decision, but have already been forced to suspend some urgent programs due to a lack of “female staff.”

According to the United Nations, about 70 percent of their programs are implemented in collaboration with NGOs, international or local agencies, which they use to bring basic resources and services to the region.

The Afghan government’s veto of allowing women to carry out humanitarian work “has immediate consequences that endanger the lives of all Afghans,” the United Nations Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) said in a statement.

Likewise, the agency has expressed its willingness to continue with the activities that save lives but foresee that “many more activities will have to be interrupted” since they cannot provide humanitarian aid without the workers.