A Kabul-based journalist travelling through Daikundi province in April 2026 documented NGO projects that had failed rural farming communities, rotten fruit beneath trees, near-worthless harvests from imported seeds, exposing the persistent dysfunction of Afghanistan’s non-profit sector at a moment when donors are withdrawing at record speed and more than 22 million Afghans require urgent humanitarian assistance.
Afghanistan’s NGO Accountability Gap Laid Bare in the Field
Writing in an opinion piece published on Friday, June 6, 2026, journalist Hujjatullah Zia described accompanying a colleague on visits to several villages in Daikundi province, central Afghanistan, to assess the outcomes of NGO-funded agricultural projects. What he found cast a long shadow over the credibility of aid delivery in the country.
One project, funded by an NGO operating in the agriculture sector, had supplied zero-energy storage houses to help rural farmers preserve harvests such as fruit and vegetables. The premise was sound, but the execution was not. In multiple villages, farmers showed Zia heaps of apples rotting beneath trees. The storage houses, they told him, had capacity for the produce of only two or three families per village, wholly inadequate for the communities they were meant to serve.
A second project, run by a separate NGO, had distributed imported vegetable seeds to farmers in another village. Staff had conducted weeks of workshops and cultivation training; farmers had invested substantial time, land, and water. The harvest, however, was meagre and of poor quality. Despite the considerable sums spent by the NGO on surveying, training, staff salaries, logistics, and transportation, each participating family received vegetables worth approximately 450 Afghans, the equivalent of roughly USD 7. There was no mechanism for compensating farmers for their losses or holding the implementing organisation to account.
A Legacy of Waste: The SIGAR Verdict
Such failures are not isolated anomalies. The final audit of the United States Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), the watchdog body established by Congress to oversee American spending in Afghanistan, found that between USD 26 billion and USD 29.2 billion of the USD 148.21 billion appropriated by the United States for Afghan reconstruction between 2002 and 2021 was lost to waste, fraud, and abuse. The report documented 1,327 separate cases of misuse, mismanagement, or corruption directly tied to US-funded programmes.
The breakdown of United States expenditure included approximately USD 88.8 billion directed at the security sector, USD 35.9 billion for development, USD 7.1 billion for humanitarian assistance, and USD 16.3 billion in institutional costs. The non-profit sphere absorbed a significant share of the development and humanitarian portions, yet accountability across the sector remained chronically weak.
SIGAR’s acting inspector general Gene Aloise concluded that early and sustained decisions to work through corrupt intermediaries had bolstered insurgent networks and eroded the foundations of stable governance, a structural failure that persisted throughout the two-decade reconstruction effort.
Funding Collapse Meets Structural Dysfunction
Since the Taliban retook power in August 2021, total humanitarian aid to Afghanistan has declined sharply, falling from USD 3.8 billion in 2022 to USD 785 million as of September 2025. The United States halted approximately USD 1.7 billion in contracts earlier in 2025, with the United Kingdom, France, and Germany making similar reductions.
The 2025 Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan for Afghanistan requires approximately USD 2.42 billion but remains significantly underfunded, limiting the scale and sustainability of humanitarian assistance. Around 22 million people, approximately half of the country’s population, require assistance in 2026, with persistent economic decline, climate shocks, and restrictive governance under the Interim Taliban Authority compounding the crisis.
Despite this contraction, the systemic problems that have long undermined NGO delivery have not abated. Zia identified three structural causes: first, the extensive use of implementing partners and subcontractors, which creates long chains of intermediaries with weakened quality oversight and a commercial incentive to cut corners; second, project proposals designed to attract funding rather than address the most pressing needs of communities; and third, the disproportionate cost of international staff, who can command salaries of USD 10,000 to USD 20,000 per month for roles that qualified local professionals could fill at a fraction of the cost.
A separate assessment noted a modest improvement: funding to local and national NGOs in Afghanistan increased to 39 percent of total disbursements in 2025, compared with 28 percent in 2024, with more than 30 national NGOs working alongside international partners and UN agencies. However, funding shortfalls continue to place immense pressure on the overall response.
The Reform Imperative
Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index placed Afghanistan at 169th out of 182 countries in 2025, with a score of 16 out of 100, a decline from its previous ranking, reflecting what the organisation describes as limited civic space, opaque political-financing systems, weak checks and balances, and the absence of independent judicial institutions.
Against this backdrop, the reform of the NGO sector is no longer merely desirable, it is structurally necessary. Analysts and field observers argue that organisations operating in Afghanistan must prioritise the direct recruitment of qualified local staff to plan and manage projects, reduce reliance on multi-layered subcontracting arrangements, and establish systematic feedback mechanisms with beneficiary communities during implementation rather than after the fact.
Background
The non-profit sector in Afghanistan expanded dramatically following the 2001 US-led intervention and the influx of international reconstruction funding. For two decades, NGOs and international development organisations operated in an environment of abundant but poorly supervised funding. The Taliban’s return to power in August 2021 triggered an abrupt withdrawal of bilateral aid and development finance, leaving a humanitarian vacuum that NGOs, already weakened by structural inefficiency, have struggled to fill.
What’s Next
The United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator has warned that 2026 risks a further contraction of life-saving assistance at a time when food insecurity, health needs, and protection risks are all rising. Without meaningful reform to Afghanistan’s NGO accountability frameworks, the dwindling pool of available funding risks being absorbed by the same structural failures that have characterised the sector for two decades, leaving Afghanistan’s most vulnerable communities worse off for every dollar spent.
Published in SouthAsianDesk, June 7, 2026
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