Please refer to the attached file.
Context and rationale
Afghanistan continues to face one of the world’s most severe nutrition crises. According to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) acute malnutrition analysis (June 2025–May 2026), an estimated 3.7 million children aged 6–59 months are facing acute malnutrition in 2026.1 Despite decades of humanitarian assistance and expanding efforts to improve household food security, these gains have not consistently translated into better nutritional outcomes for young children, suggesting that food availability alone is insufficient to prevent acute malnutrition.
Current nutrition programmes focus largely on treating acute malnutrition and its immediate causes. Breaking the cycle, however, requires greater investment in prevention, tackling the underlying drivers, embedded in local livelihood systems, that make children malnourished in the first place and drive repeated relapse after recovery. These drivers vary seasonally and include food access and income from agriculture and livestock, women’s roles and workloads, and One Health risks at the child–food–animal–environment interface.a Understanding how these drivers interact to shape child nutrition is essential to designing effective prevention strategies.