Background of the Afghan Society

Facts:

• It’s estimated that Afghanistan was first inhabited by humans at least 50,000 years ago.
• In 642 CE in Herat and Zarang, Arab Muslims spread the religion of Islam in Afghanistan.
• Before the introduction of Islam, Buddhism and Zoroastrianism were the dominant religions of Afghanistan.
• Ahmad Shah Durrani was the founder of the last Afghan empire, crowned in 1747. He united the country into one kingdom.
• His son, Timur Shah succeeded him, after his death in 1772.
• In 1776, Timur Shah relocated the capital of Afghanistan from Kandahar to Kabul.
• On the 19^th of August, 1919, Afghanistan became an independent country (from Britain), which is celebrated as a national holiday.
• The Afghanistan 1992 to 1996 civil war left at least 50,000 victims.
• For nearly 5 years, the Sunni Islamic fundamentalist political movement in Afghanistan ruled the country between 1996 and 2001.
• Elected in 2004, the first democratically elected president of Afghanistan was Hamid Karzai.
• After the 9/11 terrorist attack on the United States in 2001 that was supposedly carried out by the Osama Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda forces, a U.S and U.K coalition launched a military attack on the major cities of Afghanistan including Kabul, against the Taliban regime.
• The name Afghanistan means quite literally, “the land of Afghans”.
• Afghanistan is a landlocked country bordered by Iran, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, India, and China.
• Afghanistan’s population was 37.17 million in 2018, as a comparison that’s about half the UK population! Afghanistan is the 37^th most densely inhabited country in the world. Afghanistan is inhabited by – 80% Sunni Muslims, 19% Shia Muslim and 1% others.
• Kabul is the largest city as well as the capital of Afghanistan. It stretches on an area of 106 square miles (275 square kilometers) and had a population of 4,114 in 2019.

Current State:

Afghanistan is a unitary presidential Islamic republic. The country has high levels of terrorism, poverty, child malnutrition, and corruption.

It is a member of the United Nations, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, the Group of 77, the Economic Cooperation Organization, and the Non-Aligned Movement.

Afghanistan’s economy is the world’s 96^th largest, with a gross domestic product (GDP) of $72.9 billion by purchasing power parity; the country fares much worse in terms of per-capita GDP (PPP), ranking 169^th out of 186 countries as of 2018.

Current Challenges for Afghan Diaspora and Nonprofit

In just one generation, the Afghan people have seen many of their basic resources, such as water for irrigation, trees for food and fuel, lost.

There are other urgent environmental problems. In the cities, burning of wastes, toxic air polluting, contamination of the water supplies from uncontrolled dumping of waste products (which creates the high risk of viral and bacterial diseases) are the most glaring problems.

In Afghanistan, continued drought and protracted war added to the environmental problems.

There is no modern garbage disposal center to digest the garbage produced by some 5 million people in Kabul or recycle factories in Kabul and other big cities.

About seventeen years and almost $2 trillion later, the country is still in turmoil as the Taliban maintains its grip on almost 60 percent of the country, the most territory it has controlled since 2001. In October, the U.N. said Afghan civilian deaths were the highest since 2014: from January to September 2018, at least 2,798 civilians were killed and more than 5,000 others injured. Gallup’s most recent survey of Afghans, conducted in July, revealed strikingly low levels of optimism: Afghans’ ratings of their own lives are lower than in any country in any previous year.

As in all war-torn societies, women suffer disproportionately. Afghanistan is still ranked the worst place in the world to be a woman. Despite Afghan government and international donor efforts since 2001 to educate girls, an estimated two-thirds of Afghan girls do not attend school. Eighty-seven percent of Afghan women are illiterate, while 70-80 percent face forced marriage, many before the age of 16.

Help for Afghanistan families and Orphans

Afghan Diaspora has formed many nonprofits with devotion and passion to help families, women and children, young men, elderly and social and environmental causes.

Afghan nonprofits have been highly effective in local food distribution, clean water wells and orphan and children education.

However, the Afghan nonprofits face limited reach for support and volunteering help.

This has resulted in limited vision, strategy and sustainability of the efforts.

Nonprofit’s capabilities:

1. Accounting and budget volunteer resource
2. Website with donation
3. Social Media with multiple accounts and without content control or version control
4. No centralized account and password management
5. No updated members, volunteers, partners list or contact info.
6. Limited to no project structure with clearly defined tasks, assignments and follow-ups
7. Limited graphic design, newsletter design, media design, content and communication
8. No structured quality control, usability and timely updates of the site, donations system updates, newsletters, social media
9. Very limited ability through volunteers to design organization operation workflow processes with roles & responsibilities,
10. Limited leads and relationship management process for donations, funding, events & media