The Diplomat
Spain will contribute 16.5 million euros in humanitarian aid to Afghanistan between now and 2023, Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares announced yesterday at the United Nations Donors’ Conference.
Specifically, Spain will contribute 12.5 million euros in 2022 and another four million in 2023 through the Humanitarian Action Office of the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID), the minister said during his speech at the Donors’ Conference for Afghanistan, held in virtual format. These amounts include the contribution of 400,000 euros made by the AECID together with eleven Autonomous Communities within the framework of the Humanitarian Action agreement with decentralized cooperation.
According to the Ministry, these 16.5 million will be added to the 20 million euros of humanitarian aid committed by Spain in 2021 in support of the work of UNICEF, UNFPA, the International Committee of the Red Cross and Red Crescent (ICRC) and the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR). Apart from that, Spain sent in 2021 more than two million doses of vaccines against COVID-19, valued at more than 13 million euros, to Afghanistan’s neighboring countries to care for the Afghan refugee population.
During his participation in the conference, Albares highlighted the solidarity of the Spanish people with the Afghan population and expressed the Spanish government’s concern about the constant repression of the public freedoms of the Afghan people, especially the “unacceptable discrimination” suffered by Afghan women and girls, who have recently been deprived of the right to education by the Afghan authorities.
During the conference, the EU and all Member States pledged to provide, under the Team Europe approach, more than 524 million euros by 2022 for Afghanistan and to address the regional displacement crisis, making Europe the largest international donor in this crisis.
