Fact Sheets

Overview
 
Food insecurity continues to affect large numbers of vulnerable Afghan households. According to Afghanistan Central Statistics Office data for 2008, around 7.3 million people (31 percent of the total estimated population) is food insecure with another 5.4 million (23 percent) vulnerable to food insecurity.

Overview

Incentives Driving Economic Alternatives – North, East, West (IDEA-NEW) is a USAID project that began in March 2009, and is scheduled to be completed in March 2014.  This project continues USAID’s efforts to provide agricultural incentives and economic alternatives for provinces in the East as well as the northern and western poppy-prone regions of the country.

OVERVIEW
This three-year program improves the livelihoods of the rural poor in northeastern and central Afghanistan by building Afghanistan’s capacity to sustainably manage its natural resources. This is done while also strengthening linkages between local communities and regional and national government bodies, thereby improving governance.  The program focuses on two geographic areas, Band-e-Amir National Park and the Hazarajat Plateau of Bamyan province, and the Wakhan Corridor of Badakhshan province.  
 

The Commercial Horticulture and Agricultural Marketing Program (CHAMP) works with leading Afghan processing and export firms to enhance the supply chain, marketing, and export promotion of Afghan fruits and nuts. CHAMP supports traders through its trade offices located in New Delhi, India and Dubai, UAE to boost Afghan agricultural exports in these and other major regional markets. CHAMP is working to strengthen the capacity of local packaging manufacturers, improve the skills of exporters in business administration and finance, establish an Agricultural Export Knowledge Management Unit that will disseminate reliable data on agricultural exports, promote investment in cold storage and pack house facilities, expand quality standards certification, and support freight and logistics facilitation to promote agricultural trade. These efforts will stimulate the growth of Afghan exports to regional wholesale markets and supermarkets by up to 15,000 metric tons (MT) annually.

USAID has created a constellation of seven Development Labs that harness the intellectual power of great American and international academic institutions and that catalyze the development and application of new science, technology, and engineering approaches and tools to solve some of the world’s most challenging development problems.

The Kenya Arid Lands Disaster Risk Reduction program works to increase access to clean water and improve sanitation and hygiene in Kenya’s arid lands. The program is part of a larger effort to assist the Kenyan government and local communities to increase their resilience to droughts and flooding caused by a changing climate while simultaneously increasing access to improved water, sanitation and hygiene services.

Within Central America a rapidly deteriorating security situation has led to significantly decreased levels of citizen safety, fueled in part by the social and economic exclusion of large parts of the population. The U.S. government has developed a new vision on how to assist Central American governments as they work to address this critical issue.

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