Who Gets the Aid Money in Afghanistan

About this report

The first in a series

This is the first report in an ongoing accountability series published by Kabul Institute through the Afghanistan Aid Tracker, a public data platform tracking international assistance to Afghanistan since the Taliban's return to power in August 2021. The Tracker exists on a single premise: Afghans, and the donors, agencies, and governments who fund the country's humanitarian response, deserve a public record of where that money goes that does not depend on any single institution's willingness to disclose it.

Every dollar examined in this report was raised, in most cases, on the explicit premise that it would reach an Afghan family that needed food, medicine, shelter, or clean water. When that dollar's path goes dark after the first transfer, the practical consequence is that no one — not the donor who raised it, not Kabul Institute, not the Afghan public — can verify whether it did. Money that cannot be traced cannot be defended when it works, and cannot be corrected when it doesn't. Both failures land on the same people: the Afghans the funding was raised to help.

How to read the numbers that follow

Assistance to Afghanistan moves through the reporting system in distinct stages, and this report is careful never to collapse them into a single total. A dollar that has been “pledged” is an announcement. A dollar that is “committed, not yet paid” is a firm obligation a donor has not yet reported paying. A dollar that is “paid” is a dollar a donor has confirmed actually transferring. These are not sequential stages of the same dollar moving through a pipeline; a contribution is recorded under whichever status its donor most recently reported, and different donors report at different points in that lifecycle. Adding pledged, committed, and paid figures together would count promises as though they were payments already made. This report never does that, and any use of these figures downstream should preserve the same distinction.

A zero in this report is a finding about disclosure. It is not an assertion that no money was spent.

Section 1

The headline

Since August 2021, the international community has confirmed transferring $8.00 billion in humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan. A further $3.78 billion sits as a firm obligation that is committed, not yet paid. Separately, donors have announced $94.0 million that has not yet reached the stage of a firm, contracted commitment. And of everything paid into the response so far, the amount confirmed as actually spent on a programme, a delivery, a line item of any kind, is zero.

Source: OCHA Financial Tracking Service, humanitarian flows into Afghanistan, 2021–2026. Figures are not additive across categories.

Section 2

A shrinking response, four years running

The response has been contracting steadily since its 2022 peak. Confirmed payments rose from $1.13 billion in 2021 to $2.96 billion in 2022, the height of the emergency response to a newly isolated population and a collapsing state apparatus. Every year since 2022 has been smaller. In 2026, with the year still incomplete at the time of this report, confirmed payments stand at $597.9 million — a decline of about 80 percent from the 2022 peak.

Money paid into the Afghanistan humanitarian response each year, alongside funds committed, not yet paid. *2026 figures are partial (through 30 September 2026).

This is not simply donor attention moving on in the abstract. It tracks a broader pattern familiar to anyone who has watched international focus shift away from Afghanistan over the past several years, even as the underlying humanitarian conditions have not resolved on the same timeline. The money is leaving the response faster than the need is leaving the country.

Section 3

The number that should not exist

Of the $8.00 billion donors confirm they transferred into the Afghanistan response since 2021, not one dollar of programme-level expenditure is published anywhere in a machine-readable public source. No line item. No delivery account. No record showing what a dollar bought once it reached the organisation that received it.

This is not a case of money vanishing. Donors publish what they sent, and to whom, in considerable detail. The gap opens at the next link in the chain: the agencies that receive the funding publish essentially nothing about what happens afterward. Of the $8.00 billion paid, only $721.9 million — 9.0 percent of the total — can even be traced to a second organisation in the chain. The remaining 91.0 percent enters the system and stops being visible.

Paid to “Confidential”

Part of the untraceable share has a name, and it is a telling one. $1.42 billion, spread across 316 separate funding flows, is recorded not as delivered to any named organisation, but as paid to a recipient disclosed only as “Confidential.” Nearly a fifth of all confirmed payments into the Afghanistan response are, by the donors' own reporting, payments to a recipient the public is not permitted to identify.

A zero in this report is a finding about disclosure, not an assertion that no money was spent. It means no public source reports it.

What this costs Afghans, specifically

This gap is not a paperwork problem sitting several steps removed from anyone's daily life. It is the reason no one, inside Afghanistan or outside it, can currently confirm whether a given dollar reached a clinic, a classroom, or a family, or whether it was diverted, absorbed by overhead, or captured before it did. As Section 2 shows, the total response has already shrunk by about 80 percent since its 2022 peak. In an environment of falling funding and continued acute need, the inability to verify that existing money reaches people is not a neutral gap. It is the difference between a shrinking response that is at least being used well and a shrinking response that may not be, with no way for anyone — donor or Afghan recipient — to tell which.

Section 4

Who sent the money

Twenty-five donors account for the great majority of recorded funding into the Afghanistan response. Ranked by confirmed payments, the United States remains the largest single funder by a wide margin ($1.64 billion paid, plus $1.14 billion committed, not yet paid), followed by the United Kingdom ($1.03 billion paid) and Germany ($645.9 million paid). Together, the top five donors by confirmed payments — the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Asian Development Bank, and Japan — account for $4.42 billion, or 55 percent of all confirmed payments.

Full donor table, top 25

Ranked strictly by confirmed Paid funds (stages are never added together). “Paid” reflects funds a donor has confirmed transferring; “Committed, not yet paid” is shown separately.

Section 5

Who received the money

First-line recipients — the organisations donors paid directly — are heavily concentrated among a small number of UN agencies and multilateral bodies. Of the $8.00 billion confirmed paid into Afghanistan since 2021, $6.40 billion (80 percent) went to UN agencies and multilateral organisations as first-line recipients (with a further $1.97 billion committed, not yet paid). What each recipient did with the funding afterward is, per Section 3, largely unpublished.

Confirmed paid first-line funding by recipient organisation type (sum = $8.00B). Unpaid commitments are excluded so stages are never mixed. Funds that pooled funds and agencies pass on to other organisations inside Afghanistan are tracked separately so no dollar is counted twice.

A single organisation, the World Food Programme, has received $3.49 billion in confirmed paid funding since 2021 (plus $481.3 million committed, not yet paid) — about 44 percent of everything paid into the entire response, across 468 funding flows. No other recipient comes close: UNICEF, the second-largest recipient, has received $1.30 billion paid, under 40 percent of WFP's paid total.

Afghan national and local NGOs received $19.6 million in confirmed paid funding directly from donors — 0.25 percent of all first-line paid funding tracked since the takeover (with a further $13.4 million committed, not yet paid). Separately, $118.0 million in internal pass-through flows reached Afghan national and local NGOs through pooled funds and intermediary agencies inside Afghanistan.

This is not, on its own, a claim that funding reaching international agencies was spent poorly, or that funding reaching Afghan organisations would necessarily have been spent better; as established in Section 3, the record does not currently permit either claim to be evaluated. It is a claim about where the money, and the institutional relationships, expertise, and long-term presence that come with directly administering it, currently sits.

Full recipient table, top 25

Ranked strictly by confirmed Paid funds received directly from donors. “Confidential” recipients are recorded exactly as donors disclosed them. *Note: Norwegian Red Cross ($37,072,403 paid across 24 flows) and Norwegian Refugee Council ($37,065,127 paid across 79 flows) are distinct FTS totals that both round to $37.07M.

Section 6

The largest single channels

Looking at donor-to-recipient pairs directly shows the specific routes the largest share of confirmed payments travels. The United States–World Food Programme channel alone accounts for $1.25 billion in confirmed payments across 28 flows, more than two and a half times the next largest channel.

Top 15 donor-to-recipient pairs by confirmed payments, 2021–2026. *Note: United Kingdom to World Food Programme confirmed paid ($481,265,098 across 35 paid flows) is an independent FTS sum from WFP’s all-donor unpaid commitments ($481,270,769).

Section 7

A second, larger blind spot

Everything in the sections above concerns the $8.00 billion in confirmed humanitarian payments. It does not touch the $12.04 billion that development finance institutions — the Asian Development Bank, the EU's institutional funders, the United States government's development spending apparatus, and the World Bank — have recorded as committed, not yet paid for Afghanistan-related projects since the takeover, spread across 1,208 individual project records.

Here, the transparency gap is not partial. It is total. None of the four publishers below publishes any payment data at all for these commitments. The figures represent money committed on paper; whether any of it has actually moved, and how much, cannot currently be answered from any public source this Tracker can read. This is about one and a half times the size of the entire paid humanitarian response, sitting in a reporting category where the most basic question — was this paid — cannot currently be answered at all.

Section 8

What the money was for

Where the sectoral breakdown does exist, at the level of the category a confirmed payment was designated for, the response remains overwhelmingly weighted toward the most acute forms of survival assistance. In confirmed paid funds, Food Security accounts for $2.95 billion (plus $974.8 million committed, not yet paid) — the largest single sector by a wide margin — ahead of Health at $965.7 million paid (plus $575.9 million committed, not yet paid) and Nutrition at $705.7 million paid (plus $461.2 million committed, not yet paid). Sector-tagged confirmed payments across the twelve largest categories total $6.51 billion.

Confirmed paid funding by sector (unpaid commitments excluded so stages are never mixed).

Education, by contrast, has received $569.2 million in confirmed payments across the entire five-year period (plus $121.0 million committed, not yet paid) — less than a fifth of the Food Security paid total — in a country where an entire generation of girls has now been barred from secondary schooling for the duration of this reporting window. This is not necessarily the wrong allocation for a population facing acute humanitarian need. But it is worth naming plainly: the current pattern of international assistance to Afghanistan is a pattern of keeping people alive, not a pattern of investing in the country's ability to eventually need less of this assistance.

Section 9

What this pattern means

Put the pieces together and a single throughline emerges. About $8 billion has moved through the system since 2021. The overwhelming majority has passed through a small number of large multilateral intermediaries. Almost none of it can be traced past the point of first receipt. A meaningful share is not even attributable to a named recipient at all. And running in parallel, a second pool of development finance commitments — about one and a half times the size of the paid humanitarian total — exists in a reporting environment where payment status itself is currently unknowable.

None of this proves misuse. A zero in this report's tables is a finding about disclosure, not an accusation about spending. But the absence of disclosure is itself the story. Five years and $8 billion into the post-2021 response, the international community still cannot answer, in public, auditable, machine-readable terms, the most basic question any funder should be able to answer about its own money: what did it buy, and did it reach the people it was meant to reach.

That question is not academic for the Afghans who rely on World Food Programme assistance, or the families whose nearest functioning clinic depends on a grant this report cannot trace past its first recipient. Every year this gap persists is another year in which waste, diversion, or simple inefficiency inside the aid system is undetectable, and therefore uncorrectable, at exactly the moment the overall response is shrinking and can least afford either.

That is the gap the Afghanistan Aid Tracker exists to document, and the gap that any serious accountability effort, from policy reform to a future truth process, will eventually have to close.

Section 10

What should change

The findings above point toward a specific, actionable set of reforms — not a general call for more transparency, but concrete changes to what donors and implementing agencies are required to disclose as a condition of continued funding. Kabul Institute puts forward the following recommendations, grounded directly in the disclosure gaps this report documents.

About the publisher

Kabul Institute & the Afghanistan Aid Tracker