As the first pale light of dawn spreads over the dusty, arid streets of Chaghcharan, capital of Afghanistan’s hard-hit Ghor province, hundreds of jobless men already crowd the main square. They line the curbs, eyes scanning every passing vehicle, every potential passer-by, desperate for any day’s work that will put bread on their families’ tables. For most, this daily wait will end in disappointment. Forty-five-year-old Juma Khan is one of the lucky few: over the past six weeks, he has secured just three days of paid labour, earning between 150 and 200 Afghani – less than $3.20 – per day. His story lays bare the scale of the crisis unfolding across Afghanistan today. “My children went to bed hungry three nights straight,” Khan says, his voice heavy with despair. “My wife cried, my children cried. I had to beg a neighbour for money just to buy flour. I live in constant terror that my children will starve to death.”
Khan’s agony is far from unusual. UN data paints an unthinkable portrait of crisis across the country: three out of every four Afghans cannot cover their most basic needs for food, shelter and healthcare. Unemployment has reached epidemic levels, what remains of the national healthcare system is teetering on collapse, and the international aid that once kept millions of Afghans alive has been slashed to a tiny fraction of its former volume. The country is now facing record-breaking famine risk: an estimated 4.7 million people – more than one-tenth of the entire population – are just one step away from catastrophic starvation.
Ghor province sits at the epicentre of this disaster. In the daily job market in Chaghcharan, desperation hangs thick in the air. Rabani, another man waiting for work, says he received word days earlier that his children had gone without food for 48 hours. “I wanted to kill myself,” he says, his voice cracking with emotion. “But what good would that do my family? So I stay here, waiting for any work.” Seventy-eight-year-old Khwaja Ahmad can barely get a sentence out before he breaks down into sobs: “We are starving. My older children already died. I need work to feed the ones I have left, but I am too old – no one will hire me.”
When a local bakery opens its doors and begins handing out stale bread to the waiting crowd, the loaves are torn apart in seconds, dozens of men scrapping for every crumb. Moments later, a chaotic rush erupts: a motorcyclist passes through looking for a single labourer to haul bricks, and dozens of men throw themselves toward him, desperate to be chosen. In the two hours reporters spent observing the square that morning, only three men were hired.
A short drive from the square, across barren brown hills capped by the snow-capped peaks of the Siah Koh range, scattered mud homes tell the same devastating story. In one of these small dwellings, Abdul Rashid Azimi pulls his seven-year-old twin daughters Roqia and Rohila close, tears streaming down his face as he describes the unthinkable choice he has been forced to consider. “I am ready to sell one of my daughters,” he says. “I am poor, I am in debt, I have no other option. I come home after looking for work, hungry and parched and broken, and my children run to me asking for bread. What can I give them? There is no work anywhere. It breaks my heart, but this is the only way I can feed my other children.”
Azimi’s wife Kayhan says their family survives on nothing but bread and hot water – they cannot even afford tea. Two of their teenage sons polish shoes in the town centre to earn pennies, while a third collects rubbish to burn for cooking fuel.
Stories of child selling, once unthinkable in local communities, are now increasingly common. Saeed Ahmad already sold his five-year-old daughter Shaiqa two years ago, after the girl developed appendicitis and a liver cyst that required urgent surgery. “I had no money to pay for the operation,” Ahmad explains. “I sold her to a relative for 200,000 Afghani, roughly $3,200. I couldn’t take all the money at once – if I did, he would have taken her immediately. So I asked for just enough to cover her surgery, and arranged that he will take her in five years when he pays the rest. If I had any other option, I would never have done this. But if I didn’t, she would have died. This way, she gets to live, at least.” Shaiqa still lives with her father now, cuddling into his neck during the interview, but the clock is ticking down to her departure.
Just two years ago, Saeed and his family, like millions of Afghans, received regular life-saving food aid – flour, cooking oil, lentils, and nutritional supplements for children. But steep, widespread cuts to international assistance over the past several years have stripped most Afghans of this support. The United States, once Afghanistan’s largest single donor, cut nearly all aid to the country last year, and other major donors including the United Kingdom have followed suit with deep cuts. UN data shows total aid received by Afghanistan so far this year is 70% lower than it was in 2025. A crippling multi-year drought, which has impacted more than half of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, has only compounded the crisis, destroying crop yields and pushing millions of rural Afghans deeper into poverty.
“We have received no help from anyone – not from the government, not from non-governmental organisations,” says local villager Abdul Malik.
The Taliban government, which seized power in 2021 following the withdrawal of US and coalition foreign forces, blames the previous Western-backed administration for the current crisis. “During the 20 years of invasion, an artificial economy was built on an influx of US dollars,” Hamdullah Fitrat, deputy spokesman for the Taliban government, told the BBC. “When the invasion ended, we inherited poverty, unemployment, and all of these problems.” Fitrat added that the government has plans to address the crisis through major infrastructure and mining projects that will create jobs and reduce poverty over time.
But the Taliban’s own restrictive policies, particularly sweeping bans on women’s education, work, and public life, have been a major factor driving donor nations to cut assistance. When asked about this link, the government rejected responsibility, stating that “humanitarian assistance should not be politicised.”
For millions of Afghans on the brink of starvation, long-term economic projects are too little, too late. The crisis is already killing hundreds of the most vulnerable – especially young children. A few weeks before reporters visited, Mohammad Hashem lost his 14-month-old baby girl to hunger and lack of medical care. “My child died because she was hungry and we had no medicine,” he says. “When a baby is sick and starving, what do you expect will happen?”
Local elder says child mortality driven by malnutrition has risen dramatically in the past two years. There are no official death records kept in the province, but the local graveyard tells the story: reporters counted roughly twice as many small graves as adult ones, confirming the surge in child deaths.
At Chaghcharan’s main provincial hospital, the scale of the crisis is impossible to miss. The neonatal unit, where sick newborns receive care, is overflowing: every bed is full, and some cots hold two underweight babies at once. Most of the infants are severely undernourished, and many cannot breathe on their own without oxygen support.
When reporters visited, staff wheeled in a cot holding premature twin girls, born two months early to 22-year-old Shakila. One weighed just 2 kilograms, the other only 1kg. Both were placed immediately on oxygen, in critical condition. Their grandmother Gulbadan explained that Shakila had almost nothing to eat during her pregnancy, surviving on only bread and tea – that is why the babies were born so small and sick. A few hours after reporters left the hospital, the heavier of the two twins died before she could even be given a name. “The doctors tried everything, but she didn’t make it,” Gulbadan said the next day. “I wrapped her tiny body and brought her home. When her mother found out, she fainted. I just pray the other one survives.”
Neonatal nurse Fatima Husseini says that on some days, up to three babies die in the unit. “When I started working here, it broke my heart every time a child died,” she says. “Now, it has become normal. We see it so often.” Dr Muhammad Mosa Oldat, head of the unit, says the infant mortality rate here reaches as high as 10% – a figure he calls “completely unacceptable.” “Every day, more and more malnourished babies are brought in, but we do not have the resources to treat them properly,” he says.
In the paediatric intensive care unit, six-week-old Zameer is fighting for his life against meningitis and pneumonia – both easily treatable conditions, but the hospital has no MRI scanner to properly diagnose and manage his case. Even more shockingly, the public hospital does not provide most medications for patients: families have to buy all required drugs from private pharmacies outside, which most cannot afford. “Sometimes we can reuse leftover medicines from families that can afford them, for babies whose parents have no money,” Fatima says.
Even when stabilised by hospital staff, most poor families cannot afford to keep their children in hospital for ongoing care. Gulbadan’s surviving granddaughter was gaining weight and her breathing had stabilised after a few days, but her family took her home because they could not pay for continuing care. Baby Zameer was also taken home by his parents for the same reason. Now, their tiny bodies will have to fight for survival on their own, with no medical support to help them.
