Story Highlights:

• A rural community dependent on agriculture as their livelihood was left devasted in the wake of heavy flash floods that destroyed their homes, farmlands, and livestock.
• The Community Resilience and Livelihoods project creates employment opportunities for vulnerable communities through cash-for-work programs to build or rehabilitate their community assets. It aims to increase household incomes, sustain access to basic services and strengthen the communities’ resilience to shocks.
• UNOPS is implementing the project, with support from the Afghanistan Resilience Trust Fund (ARTF).

In Afghanistan, the seasonal rains and heavy flash floods in July 2023 led to hundreds of lives lost, damage to residential houses, destruction of thousands of hectares of agricultural lands, and the death of livestock.

This event has caused some provinces to experience heavy floods for the first time while others suffered more severe floods than in the past. Alone in Mohammadullah’s village, over 100 households were severely affected by the flash floods.

Mohammadullah is a farmer who owns agricultural land on which he cultivated vegetables, such as potatoes. His village, in Logar province, is among those that were hardest hit by the heavy flash floods, which led to the destruction of his farmland, his only source of livelihood.

The vegetables cultivated on his farmland were enough to meet the daily needs of his family and he sold the surplus in the market. The income from the sale of surplus products was spent on additional food, medical treatment, and other household expenses.

Life was much easier, Mohammadullah recalls, because he could make a living through the farmland. Unfortunately, it did not take long for him to lose everything when an unexpected flash flood hit his village, destroying his farmland and leaving him with little choice for survival.

Like Mohammadullah, the majority of people in rural communities in Afghanistan rely on agriculture as the primary source of livelihood and when a natural disaster such as floods strikes communities, it puts them in a fragile situation.

“The flash flood didn’t just destroy my farmland but it also destroyed the canal that I used to irrigate my land, now I cannot grow anything”, says Mohammadullah, disappointment visible on his face.

Cash for Work, Participating in Community Development

The Community Resilience and Livelihoods (CRL) project creates employment opportunities for vulnerable people like Mohammadullah through cash-for-work programs to build or rehabilitate their community assets. It aims to help them increase household income levels, sustain access to basic services, and strengthen their resilience to shocks.

Thanks to the CRL project, Mohammadullah now works as a laborer and takes part in the rehabilitation of the irrigation canal that once irrigated his land but was destroyed by the floods. He earns a daily wage of Afghani 450 (about US$6), which is enough to provide three meals a day for his family.

The CRL project has supported Mohammadullah in many ways. He is pleased that he has a source of income that enables him to provide food for his family and feels proud that he has a small role in the development of his village. Above all, he is happy when he thinks about his farmland being functional again as he believes that he can start cultivating his land again once the irrigation canal is rehabilitated.

“I will be able to cultivate my land in the coming spring and I will get a good income from the sale of those products, my life will go back to normal”, says Mohammadullah happily.

In this village, the rehabilitation of the irrigation canal has employed 70 villagers who benefitted from cash for work activity, and over 100 households benefitted from access to irrigation water.

Supporting Communities to Adapt to a Changing Climate

The CRL project responds to the needs of vulnerable communities through emergency livelihood support and services. The project invites communities affected by natural disasters to share their experiences of the impact of severe weather on their lives. Then, with support from community members, the project identifies and prioritizes issues and addresses them based on the needs of the communities, focusing on the rehabilitation of irrigation canals and construction of trenches and terraces, water reservoirs, check dams, gully plugs, and flood protection walls. This helps the communities to improve the efficient use of water for agriculture and store excess water, protect the environment from flooding, and make their community resilient to shocks.

Since the start of the project in 2022, over 3,000 subprojects in urban and rural areas across the country have helped put in place infrastructure that allows local communities to better adapt to a changing climate.

Afghanistan is one of the countries in the world prone to various forms of natural disasters, including floods, earthquakes, and avalanches. Most of these disasters are rooted in climate change, which is expected to worsen in the coming years.

With Afghanistan facing some of the worst threats from climate change, resilience must be built into projects whenever possible. Every protection wall or check dam helps mitigate the risk of unpredictable weather for entire communities, protecting vital crops and livelihoods. When climate adaptation is included in development projects —as it is with CRL—they stand to serve generations to come.