In this blog, Abdurahman Sharif, Save the Children’s Senior Humanitarian Director, shares a powerful firsthand account from Afghanistan, highlighting the urgent needs of returning families and children. With services at risk from aid cuts, he calls for immediate support and long-term investment to protect lives and secure futures.
This past week, I had the opportunity to visit Afghanistan—a country navigating a crossroads of crisis and resilience. Our journey took us from Kabul to Jalalabad by air, and then by road to Torkham. Just a few years ago, I was told, this drive would have been unthinkable due to security concerns. Now, it’s a corridor of return —for hundreds of thousands seeking refuge in a homeland grappling with its own challenges.
In Torkham, I witnessed the unfolding humanitarian emergency firsthand. Since November 2023, more than 900,000 people have returned to Afghanistan from Pakistan—90,000 in just the first two weeks of April alone, over half of them children. Imagine that: tens of thousands of children, returning with little more than the clothes on their backs, in overcrowded trucks arriving in a country already struggling to meet the basic needs of its people.
Save the Children is on the ground, providing health and nutrition services through static health clinics , targeting families and children in need. In addition, we are ensuring access to clean drinking water and adequate sanitation facilities for all, with a particular focus on women and girls at Torkham and Spin Bodak to further ensure the safety, health, and dignity of those in transit.
Our child protection teams are actively supporting families, women, and children through dedicated Child and Information help desks at the Torkham border crossing. Plans are on course to re-establish a child safe space at Spin Boldak and Torkham, with the latter offering more specific education support.
Recent cuts to foreign aid are putting millions of children in life-threatening situations. Your support is needed more than ever.
I spent time at one of our child-friendly spaces, where I kicked a football around with a few boys. When I asked if they knew any famous football players, they shook their heads. “Cricket,” they told me. That’s all they know. And rightly so—Afghanistan’s cricket team is rising fast, holding its own against giants like India and Pakistan. These kids still dare to dream.
In Nangarhar Province, I visited Maternal and Child Health Facilities and community-based schools—vital lifelines in these communities. Each health facility supports around 10,000 people. But here's the heartbreaking truth: many of these centres were slated for closure due to foreign aid cuts. Only emergency funding from our donors—through the Children’s Emergency Fund—has kept them open. But that funding runs out in less than six months. After that? Their future is uncertain.
The consequences of these cuts are already being felt. Many health facilities have been shut down in Nangarhar leaving thousands of families with children without access to essential health care services. Nationwide, close to 200 health centres have closed , impacting potentially nearly 2 million people. These numbers are more than statistics—they represent mothers unable to deliver safely, children without vaccinations, families left without hope.
Karima* (11 months) in the arms of her mother in one static health facility of Save the Children, in a remote village of Afghanistan. Atabek Khadim / Save the Children
Back in Kabul, I visited schools supported by our local partners. The children welcomed me with chocolates, messages of thanks, and cards quoting Nelson Mandela:
Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.
How true—and how urgent.
Afghanistan’s children are facing one of the worst humanitarian crises in recent memory. Nearly 23 million people—almost half the population—are in need of humanitarian support. Children are contending with historic levels of hunger and malnutrition, while severe drought parches entire provinces. And with an estimated 1.6 million Afghan refugees potentially returning by December 2025 (according to Border consortium of which Save the children is a member), the pressure on already fragile systems will become unbearable. This is a crisis within a crisis.
We cannot turn away.
This is not the time to scale back. Now is the time for the international community to step up.
These families need immediate relief—but they also need long-term investments: in education, health, livelihoods, and sustainable solutions that allow communities to rebuild from the inside out. We are calling on donors to reverse their decisions on aid cuts and increase their efforts to disburse flexible aid to the aid agencies operating on the ground to provide lifesaving and early basic services to returnees.
The world must not abandon Afghanistan—not now, not when so many lives hang in the balance. These children need our support.
They deserve a chance at childhood. They deserve a future.
