Archived Document
Quarterly Report
Canadian Priorities: Making and Measuring Progress
Priority 3. Provide humanitarian assistance for extremely vulnerable people, including refugees, returnees and internally displaced persons.
Humanitarian Assistance
Canada is:
- clearing land of mines in Kandahar and providing education and awareness training on landmines to locals;
- providing food to vulnerable persons in Kandahar;
- providing non-food packages of necessities (blankets, kitchen utensils, etc.) to vulnerable populations in Kandahar; and
- providing health care to children through therapeutic feeding and polio vaccinations, and vaccinating Kandahari women and children against measles and tetanus.
Afghanistan continues to suffer natural and conflict-induced emergencies. In Kandahar and throughout the country, millions of Afghans face life-threatening deprivations. Ensuring that humanitarian assistance alleviates suffering and meets life-sustaining needs gives expression to fundamental Canadian values and preserves Afghan opportunities for more secure development. Helping to rescue vulnerable populations from emergencies is essential if hard-fought security gains and development progress are to be maintained.
Canada is already a leading contributor to humanitarian assistance in Kandahar province. Our support to the World Food Programme has fed more than 6.7 million Afghans in southern Afghanistan, including Kandahar. We also support the efforts of the International Committee of the Red Cross, UNICEF and the UN Refugee Agency to meet the needs of internally displaced persons, refugees and vulnerable populations in Afghanistan. In addition to food aid, Canadian humanitarian assistance funds are providing people in need with essential non-food supplies such as cooking sets, blankets and clothes.
Over the next three years, Canadian humanitarian support will focus on the delivery of food and non-food aid and essential health services to vulnerable people, including Afghan refugees, and returning refugees and internally displaced persons in Kandahar.
In the third signature project, Canada will dramatically expand support for polio immunization in Kandahar and across the country. This project aims to eradicate polio entirely from Afghanistan by the end of 2009, with the vaccination of more than seven million children under the age of five. (Afghanistan is one of the last four countries in the world where polio is considered endemic.)
In all our humanitarian assistance, Canada will contribute to extending access to basic health care, especially among women and children and in under-served areas of the province. Support for the clearance and disposal of landmines will be intensified in collaboration with the United Nations Mine Action Service. These and other efforts will be reinforced by engagement with authorities in Kabul to improve the Afghan government’s service to these vulnerable groups.
Canadian Objective for 2011:
- Humanitarian assistance will continue to be accessible to Afghan refugees, and to returnees and internally displaced persons in Kandahar.
We will measure our progress toward this objective through the demonstrated capacity of Afghan institutions to plan, coordinate and deliver emergency assistance with indicators such as the number of vulnerable people reached by humanitarian aid in key districts; a reduction in the number of landmine victims; land made safely accessible by demining; and the number of children vaccinated against polio.
