Afghanistan Peace CampaignAfghanistan Analysts Network
Much has been written about the Afghan economy since the re-establishment of the Islamic Emirate in 2021: the data show a calamitous economic contraction, a fragile recovery where per capita GDP is actually falling, a labour market struggling to provide jobs and livelihoods, women and children taking on home-based work for a pittance, a large number of older boys taken out of school to work and Afghans emigrating, even as millions more are forced to ‘return’ from Iran and Pakistan. This report goes beyond the macro-economic trends to look at what they mean for individuals and their families. Guest author Gulhan Durzai* hears from Afghans, especially Afghan women, about their efforts to survive deepening impoverishment, the daily calculations and sacrifices, their relentless determination to try to keep households afloat and the point at which survival requires the unthinkable.
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The accounts in this report reveal the sequence through which households exhaust one coping mechanism after another, something that economic indicators alone cannot convey. Some of the interviewees were once self-reliant, with professional jobs, savings and assets. Others were already poor and had little cushion against further economic shocks. Yet their stories reveal a common progression as families exhaust one option after another. Savings are spent and assets sold. Women and children take on home-based piecework for meagre returns or become street vendors. Families borrow from relatives, neighbours and landlords. Sons are sent on dangerous journeys to Iran in the hope that remittances will keep those left behind afloat. Children are withdrawn from school to work, or sent to residential institutions that can provide them with food and shelter. Strategies that ensure immediate survival often erode the very resources – education, assets and earning potential – on which a family’s future depends. The accounts show, as well, how Emirate policies have removed many of the options available for women by severely restricting their access to education and paid employment. For those with no male breadwinner, the options are desperate indeed.
These stories illustrate how sudden shocks – work drying up, illness, a breadwinner dying – can push even the better-off into previously unimagined poverty and already vulnerable households into extreme hardship. They show how economic shocks cascade through Afghan society: when a university lecturer loses her job, the widowed cleaner she employed loses her income as well and is pushed to begging; when a son who has been sending back remittances, is deported, his whole family is impoverished, overnight; when a widowed mother becomes too ill to work, it is her eldest daughter, just 11 years old, who has to try to keep the family afloat.
The interviews also demonstrate how households struggle relentlessly to survive, rather than passively succumbing to poverty, tracing a process that aggregate economic indicators cannot capture. The strong social contract whereby Afghans try to help each other in a crisis still holds, but is under strain. As one coping mechanism after another fails, today’s survival increasingly comes at the cost of tomorrow’s prospects, until some families are left facing choices no parent would willingly make.
Edited by Kate Clark and Roxanna Shapour
*Gulhan Durzai graduated in 2026 with a Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE) degree from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. She has worked as a freelance researcher for AAN since 2023, and as an archive researcher, interpreter and assistant in documentary film production.
You can preview the report online and download it by clicking here or the download button below.
