Afghanistan: Hard to Reach (HtR) Assessment Round 6 – Area Key Findings (August – October 2021) – Afghanistan

CONTEXT

Endemic poverty and conflict have combined with recent governance changes, economic shock and natural disasters to generate diverse needs and vulnerabilities in Afghanistan.

The speed with which humanitarian needs are evolving requires analysis at regular intervals to support geographic and sectoral priorities within the humanitarian response in Afghanistan. This round of the Hard-to-reach Places (HtR) Assessment seeks to expand the HtR’s objectives of monitoring less accessible areas, as well as seeking to inform the prioritization of urgent needs by monitoring the development of respects, coping strategies and gaps in basic services. HtR Round 6 was conducted in as many previously mapped districts as possible – an increase from 133 districts in the previous one to 248 districts in this round – and seeks to complement the Whole of Afghanistan Assessment (WoAA) 2021 at the household level by collecting data on agreed indicators at district level.

METHODOLOGY

The HtR methodology uses settlements as the unit of analysis. A structured survey tool was used to interview key informants (KIs) – ie. government officials, religious leaders, teachers, doctors or other community members with significant local knowledge about the humanitarian situation in their locality. A sampling frame was used covering 248 districts in 31 provinces of Afghanistan with a minimum coverage of 10% of the total population in each district. In order to achieve geographical dispersion in each district, at least three Key Informant Interviews (KIIs) were conducted in each Basic Service Unit (BSU) in a number proportional to the number of settlements. To define a BSU – defined as an economic/geographical service unit that relies on the same services (i.e. health clinics and schools) and common public spaces (i.e. markets and roads) – participatory mapping locations and available services was performed before data collection. Data collection took place between August 4 and October 17, 2021. A total of 7,467 KIIs were included in the analysis – including 75 (1%) female KIIs and 1,232 interviews (16.5%) with individuals who self-identified as disabled, when presented with the Washington Group Short Set (WGSS) definition of disability. For more information, see Formatted data and analysis. The following is an example analysis – ie. not statistically representative.

LIMITS

• Enumerators purposively select KIs by snowballing. Convenience sampling may favor the most externally available KIs (ie, males, persons without disabilities), which may introduce bias into the data and subsequent analysis. To mitigate this, enumerators attempted to interview KI women and persons with disabilities when possible, keeping in mind the principle of ‘do no harm’.

• Enumerators purposively select settlements when there are 3 or more settlements in the BSU to obtain a minimum coverage of 10% of the total number of settlements in each district. This may favor the most externally accessible settlements in the BSU, which may then introduce bias in the data and subsequent analysis.

• The HtR methodology relies on KII – ie. it is indicative of the perspectives of key informants in the assessed settlements and may not reflect the experiences of individual households within the assessed settlements.

• The number of KIs interviewed in some areas is very small, i.e. less than 10 KI.

NAVIGATION

The following maps and tables from the sixth round of the HtR assessment highlight key indicators from the survey that help contextualize Afghanistan’s economic and livelihood situation and inform understanding of different sectoral needs. This document is organized into area-level tables that are grouped by sector showing the percentage of KIs reporting key indicators in each area. Each table showing the listed groups of sector indicators is further organized alphabetically by region, then alphabetically by province and district within each region.