Far From Home: The Afghans Aiding Afghanistan

A global business enterprise pivoted to become a fundraising platform; a research institute became a charity; an entrepreneur donated a portion of each sale to a charity; a community cooked Afghan dishes to raise funds. This is the Afghan diaspora, spread over the world from Germany to California to Australia and working to help their homeland, Afghanistan, survive a devastating hunger crisis from thousands of miles away.

The lingering hunger crisis in Afghanistan has provoked a sense of responsibility and generosity among diaspora communities that stretch across the world. Decades of instability flung the Afghan diaspora around the globe, to places as disparate as Australia and Germany, metropolises like London to Los Angeles. These communities are now raising funds, donating, and getting creative to support those still in Afghanistan, trapped in increasingly difficult circumstances.

The diaspora’s efforts are driven by their personal experiences wrestling with poverty in the country, by their age-old homesickness, and by their lifelong love for their country. With gestures as small as sharing a fundraising link on their social media pages or donating $5 to a charity, they aim to save as many people from starvation as possible. Despite the monumental challenge of it, they hope to fill in the yawning gap left by the failure of the international community to combat the layered crises in Afghanistan.

Over the past several months, a starvation crisis has loomed larger each week in plain sight, with development agencies sounding the alarm. The United Nations’ World Food Program says that as much as 95 percent of the Afghan population lacks enough food. Save the Children said 14 million children in Afghanistan faced “life-threatening levels of hunger.”

But in response, in late March when the United Nations made an aid appeal of $4.44 billion to help the country, only half of the appeal was met with pledges.

Attention on Afghanistan, and its many challenges, was already in free fall before Russia’s February 24 invasion of Ukraine. The ongoing war in Ukraine has further drained attention from Afghanistan, but it dealt other blows too. Ukraine, once a donor of aid to Afghanistan, has now become a competing recipient of aid. Furthermore, the war in Europe has stymied exports of wheat, which both Ukraine and Russia previously exported in vast amounts. With bread a main staple of the Afghan diet, the war in Ukraine has further damaged already stressed food supply chains, deepening hunger.

“There is a feeling among the diaspora community” to help people in Afghanistan, said Omar Haidari, an Afghan advocate and fundraiser who lives in Berlin, Germany. “The diaspora saw the selective solidarity of the West and felt Afghans have only got themselves.”

The fall of Kabul to the Taliban in August 2021 drew the attention of Afghan diaspora communities back toward the country. The sudden collapse of the Western-backed government of Ashraf Ghani left Afghan diaspora communities desperate and hopeless as they watched the Taliban return to rule over the country with AK-47s and U.S. military vehicles abandoned by Afghan forces.

The new reality of life under the Taliban reached Afghans abroad via graphic images of hunger-stricken people circulating on social media pages. The desperation and devastation scrolled by under the fingers of diaspora communities safe in wealthy Western countries.

“Don’t eat out,” pled one a message on Twitter from a member of the Afghan diaspora, saying “one meal out can feed an entire family.”

Online fundraising efforts on different platforms surged. From GoFundMe to Global Giving, diaspora communities began raising funds and donating to support people still in Afghanistan. Hundreds of fundraising pages have collected donations from the Afghan diaspora and non-Afghans alike since August 2021. Slowly, non-Afghan attention and donations dried up and shifted elsewhere, but the Afghan diaspora cannot look away. They have continued to fundraise and created new ways of supporting Afghanistan.

One Afghan-led enterprise, ASEEL, transformed from an e-commerce platform to a fundraising platform. Before the fall of Kabul, ASEEL was an online platform that enabled the sale of Afghan handmade art to global markets. The enterprise changed its mission to raise funds and took on the form of a charity, using its online presence and networks to raise money and get it to those in need. Its website and apps began advertising humanitarian aid efforts rather than product sales, allowing people to fund emergency food packages and first aid kits in general or direct them to specific beneficiaries.

The venture also allows diaspora communities to begin their own fundraising efforts, too. With graphic images of hunger-stricken children, posts fill the platform asking for as little as $5. “Help Children in Badakhshan” read the title of one fundraising effort. “Support Afghan families for Ramadan,” said another recent plea. And another asked for donations to “Support Widows, Orphans, and Improvised Families in Ghazni.”

Beyond online fundraising, the diaspora holds events in person to raise funds. Etahad Berlin, a community of Afghans in Germany’s capital, cooked Afghan dishes and invited people to enjoy a taste of Afghanistan. “Enjoy dishes cooked by our activist women,” read an online poster for the event on March 11. “Share its joy with children in Afghanistan.” With the funds raised, the diaspora community sent food packages to Afghanistan. “Thanks for making the kindness bridge between Kabul and Berlin happen,” a Facebook post after the event read.

“One night, Afghans had an event in London,” said Haidari, the 27-year old activist in Berlin. “They raised 45,000 pounds. But it is not enough” for helping and saving people in the long run. Haidari, who volunteers at ASEEL, says that they are working to create job opportunities for Afghans in Kabul and elsewhere.

ASEEL, through which thousands of families have received food packages, added a new approach: Haidari and the team purchased carts for dozens of families, which they use for selling fruits, vegetable, and other goods. The carts enable employment, on which the families rely for survival. “We need to run business and capital in Kabul,” said Haidari. “We help them to making a living” without constant donations.

Organizations for Development Solutions, a research institute turned charity, took a similar approach after online fundraising and distribution of food packages to female widows in Kabul and elsewhere in Afghanistan. The institute, based in Kabul but funded by the Afghan diaspora in Melbourne, Australia, provides raw materials for carpet weaving to widows. In return, the widows weave carpets and sell them to diaspora communities through the institute. The systems creates a sustainable source of income.

“The widows said they want an income,” said Mustafa Soroush, the 37-year-old chief executive officer of Organizations for Development Solutions. “They have young children and mostly lost their husbands to the war either in the form of suicide bombing or combat.” Around 120 families have received food packages – many of them were on the verge of starvation before receiving the aid. Thanks to the carpet weaving scheme, 50 families now have a stable source of income.

The scale of the demand is heartbreaking for Soroush, a former government official who studied abroad but decided to stay in Kabul to help people in need. He said that he faces an overwhelming number of people stricken by starvation. Whenever he distributes food packages, people who have not eaten for several days circle him, asking for as little as a single piece of bread.

“There was a woman who burst into tears,” said Soroush. “It was obvious that she had not eaten anything for days: her skin had dried up, and her bones were visible and her lips were parched.”

“Donations by the diaspora really save peoples’ lives,” he added.

For the diaspora, the motivation to help Afghans from abroad comes from personal experience. Farkhondeh Akbari, one of the founders of Organizations for Development Solutions who was raised in Melbourne, says that many in the Afghan diaspora experienced starvation and hardship in Afghanistan before leaving. “They know what an empty stomach feels like,” said Akbari, a 24-year-old postdoctoral fellow at Monash University in Melbourne.

“They carry Afghanistan within themselves,” she added. “The diaspora do not have luxury lives abroad, but they still share” what they have with people back home.

One member of the Afghan diaspora defined her life purpose as helping her people in her home: Afghanistan. Mariam Razaq was born in a refugee camp in Germany in 1981 after her parents fled the Soviet invasion of 1979. Later, Razaq moved to Virginia, in the United States, where she attended school and then college. But in essence, she felt she was living in Kabul, too, through her mother’s memories of her hometown.

After college, Razaq had a chance to go back to a place where she grew in her mind: She first visited Kabul in 2005. “I felt at home in Kabul,” said Razaq, who volunteered with other women to run an orphanage in Kabul until 2019. “I just can’t stop thinking about helping my people.”

Like many people hit by the global pandemic, Razaq was laid off from her job in California, where she lives with her two daughters. In October 2021, Razaq, a single mom, booked herself a flight to Istanbul, Turkey, pursuing her dream of launching a business. She walked around Istanbul’s shops, looking for Afghan and other sellers of Central Asian jewelry. Months into opening her business, Afsana Boutique, Razaq now donates 10 percent of each sale to a charity to help people in her home.

“I don’t want Afghan mothers to sell their daughters or die of hunger,” said Razaq. “I don’t want a fancy life, but I want to be able help people back in my home.”