The UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, has finished building hundreds of new homes less than six months after an earthquake decimated settlements in a remote part of southeast Afghanistan, a press release writes.
Community leaders, senior UN officials, and the ambassador of Kazakhstan inaugurated some of the 700 houses that will be finished this month as part of the 1,300 shelter project UNHCR is working on in the Spera and Barmal districts of Afghanistan on Thursday at a ceremony in the Barmal district of Paktika Province.
Around 1,000 Afghans were killed in the earthquake in June 2022, including over 300 children, and 70% of the dwellings in the worst-affected areas of Barmal, Giyan, and Spera were demolished or damaged.
Approximately 700 homes built with local labor have been completed by UNHCR and its partner, the Agency for Humanitarian and Development Assistance for Afghanistan (AHDAA), giving the communities in Afghanistan’s impoverished southeast crucial income support.
The freshly constructed UNHCR homes, which were created after resident consultations, are furnished with bukhari stoves for cooking and heating as well as solar panels and batteries for lighting. The buildings feature a kitchen, two rooms, and a bathroom as well.
The earthquake-resistant homes built by the organization have stone walls that are 60 cm thick, two reinforced concrete ring beams, and a meter-wide cement base. A steel-braced roof is supported by reinforced concrete columns.
A diverse group of nations, including the United States, the member states of the European Union, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Norway, as well as Australia, Canada, Japan, Korea, and China, are supporting UNHCR’s emergency response in Afghanistan. The Saudi Fund for Development, Kuwait, Bahrain’s Royal Humanitarian Foundation, and pooled monies from the UN, such as the Afghanistan Humanitarian Fund (AHF) and the Special Trust Fund for Afghanistan (STFA), have all contributed significantly.
To observe the distribution of 2,000 home supplies, including mattresses and clothing, which Kazakhstan contributed to UNHCR for families in the earthquake zone, Ambassador Alimkhan Yessengeldiyev of Kazakhstan traveled to Barmal with the UN delegation.
The impacted regions of Barmal, Spera, and Giyan have been included to the UNHCR’s Priority Areas of Return and Reintegration (PARR) initiative, according to Leonard Zulu of the organization. In addition to the construction of flood retaining walls and wells, UNHCR is currently constructing roads to link villages.
