Help us feed hungry children in Afghanistan

This year, The Khaled Hosseini Foundation is pleased to announce that our annual fundraising campaign will focus on providing emergency food relief programs and emergency relief for women and children in Afghanistan.

Our 2025 Campaign:

Wazhma was a teacher, providing an income for her family by educating the next generation of children in her community. Today, she and her children are among the one in four people in Afghanistan facing severe food insecurity.

Naseema, a resident midwife at the UNICEF-supported Nahiye Se basic health center, estimates that one-fifth of her female patients are anemic, unable to maintain their own health or that of their children. Her work at the center is holistic – aiming to stop malnutrition before it starts in the womb.

UNICEF explains, “Malnutrition is at the center of a Venn diagram of deprivations. Its root cause is poverty, exacerbated by multiple intersecting environmental factors. Badakhshan, [home to the Nahiye Se center] exemplifies a perfect storm of geography, climate and poverty, culminating in one of the highest malnutrition rates countrywide. This year, 165,000 young children and 93,000 pregnant and lactating women in the province are expected to suffer acute malnutrition. An estimated fifth of the children will need life-saving treatment.”

What is most notable about this crisis is that Nahiye Se basic health center is in a suburb of Faizabad city, home to professional households that used to bring in a dual income. Since the ban on women working, the earning power of many local families has halved.

“Countrywide, nine in ten Afghan children are not getting the variety or quantity of foods they need to grow up healthy,” UNICEF reports. “Some foods are simply not available: for remote communities, markets are geographically unreachable. Other foods are financially unaffordable for many families.”

In recent years, Afghan women have seen hard won rights, including the right to earn a living, summarily stripped from them. Access to food and healthcare are their daily worry. Their suffering, and the impacts of malnutrition on their children, are inescapable, but not inevitable.

Today, for example, thanks to the care she has received, Wazhma and her unborn baby are doing well. The prognosis for Afghanistan is, however, sobering: this year, 3.5 million children and 1 million pregnant and lactating women are expected to need treatment for acute malnutrition. Much more needs to be done to stop the next generation of Afghans starting life one step behind.

 At The Khaled Hosseini Foundation, we work year-round to identify and communicate with the nonprofits doing the most to address starvation, malnutrition and maternal health in Afghanistan. We study the work (and financials) of organizations including UNICEF, UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières, and others taking a holistic approach to these issues by addressing not only immediate needs, but the systemic factors that cause them.  And with your help, we support their efforts.

Hanifa, a neonatal nurse, checks the vital signs of a newborn baby in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) at the MSF maternity hospital in Khost province, Afghanistan. In 2024, 1,845 infants were admitted to the NICU – most often because they were suffering from sepsis, low birth weight, or birth asphyxia, and needed specialized treatment before they could be discharged to go home with their mothers.

Each year at this time, we ask you to join us in doing all that we can to show the women and children of Afghanistan that they are not forgotten. We send them our care, our attention, and most importantly, we join forces with a few outstanding nonprofits providing essential care.

This year, our goal is to raise $50,000 for:

·       Emergency food relief programs and in-patient therapeutic feeding centers

·       Mobile health and nutrition teams

·       Stipends that enable families to purchase food and medicine

I thank you, with all my heart, for joining me today with a gift of any size. I hope that contributing as generously as you can fills you with the joy that comes from standing with others who translate their care into action.

Together we can deliver food, health and hope for the holidays.

Khaled Hosseini

P.S. For your convenience, you can give online at www.khaledhosseinifoundation.org or send a check to The Khaled Hosseini Foundation, 5655 Silver Creek Valley Road, #203, San Jose, CA 95138. Your gift is tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law and after third-party fees, 100% of your donation will go directly to our grantees providing healthcare to women and children in Afghanistan.

Photo Credits: Page 1: © UNICEF; Page 2: Khost 2025 © Logan Turner/MSF

© The Khaled Hosseini Foundation, www.khaledhosseinifoundation.org, info@khaledhosseinifoundation.org

DONATE