The United Nations has called for $5 billion, its largest ever appeal for a single country, to provide aid for Afghanistan in 2022 to avert a humanitarian crisis. Such aid would include shelter, winter assistance, health care, emergency food and water, sanitation, and hygiene services.

While some $4.4 billion of those funds would go to providing aid within the nation, the rest would go to helping Afghans who have fled the country and taken shelter in the surrounding nations. U.N. Aid Chief Martin Griffiths says the system of humanitarian aid has been carefully calculated so that all of the funds would go directly toward aiding Afghan citizens, not to officials.

Since the Taliban takeover, Western countries abruptly withdrew all foreign aid to Afghanistan and placed sanctions directed at the Taliban. This has left the country's economy in peril with rising food prices triggering a surge in hunger and starvation and shortages of medicine and other supplies.

"This is a stop gap, an absolutely essential stop gap measure that we are putting in front of the international community today," Griffiths says "Without this being funded there won't be a future, we need this to be done otherwise there will be outflow, there will be suffering."

The United States has responded to the UN by promising to provide $308 million in humanitarian aid as well as one million additional COVID-19 vaccine doses.

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