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Shoaib Sharifi is Â鶹ԼÅÄ Media Action’s country director in Afghanistan and this year’s Â鶹ԼÅÄ News Leader of the Year. He writes about how the team are responding to an increasingly grave humanitarian crisis.

On the morning of 15 August, I stood in front of my closet and chose one of my sharpest Western-style suits to wear to the office. To this day, I cannot explain why – except that nothing suggested that this day would be very different from the day before.

In the office, the workday began as usual, with preparation for a training session with humanitarian aid workers. But by 11 o’clock that morning, we heard the news that the Taliban had entered Kabul.

We could not believe it – it felt as though someone had told us the moon had landed on the Earth. It will take another year for us to digest these events.

What happens next?

My immediate concern was for the welfare of our team, particularly our female colleagues. Hours-long traffic jams in the streets made it difficult to ensure people’s safe return home; many resorted to walking, in small groups for additional security. Full of regret for having chosen this suit, which prevented me from blending in, I waited until nightfall for my own departure. There had been numerous targeted killings each day in Kabul before the Taliban’s takeover, with many journalists among them.

The next day we asked ourselves: what happens next? And we realised we were not prepared to stop working.  

The safety and welfare of colleagues was the first priority. But the other priority was our audiences. Many radio stations stopped broadcasting, out of fear, and we knew our audiences needed us more than ever.

No one was asked to come into work – but some did, at great risk, while others worked from home. In this difficult and dangerous situation, we have tried to focus on audience needs. Within the first few weeks, 2,000 health centres, including major hospitals, were closed down across the country.

We had been producing a radio health programme twice per month, focused on COVID-19 and broadcast on Â鶹ԼÅÄ Afghan service and on 30 community radio stations, reaching up to 12 million people. Now, people were without meaningful public health services, so we increased our programme frequency to twice per week – once in Dari and once in Pashto. We enlisted doctors to help us in a new programme segment, Where There Is No Doctor – covering topics like how to nurse patients at home.

Skyrocketing mental health needs

All of Â鶹ԼÅÄ Media Action’s work is based on audience research. In September, we were able to carry out research, mainly by mobile phone, to assess our audiences’ needs for health information. What came back was startling: 62% of respondents identified a need for mental health support. Stress, anxiety and depression had skyrocketed.

We created a question-and-answer segment for our radio programme, and asked our audience to send in voice messages with their questions and experiences, to be addressed with a counsellor on the next show. We were overwhelmed with hundreds of calls, from both men and women.

Amid all the hardship and risk, we have had this incredible feeling of being able to respond in an emergency with information that really matters. People are without incomes, without healthcare and without the information they need to make informed decisions. Where do they turn? In a crisis, radio is still the most important source of media for Afghans.

We realised that we could reach more people if we used our Lifeline programming to train more community journalists to report effectively in a crisis. We worked around the clock to adapt training materials into Dari and Pashto - a month’s worth of translating, editing and subtitling in one week. We weren’t even sure anyone would turn up. But in our first session we were amazed to see 25 participants, including six women. We have further built these connections through WhatsApp groups: answering questions, helping with story ideas and interview questions, and assessing listener needs.

We have also carried on working with the humanitarian response community, conducting research and sharing our findings to help aid agencies respond to people’s needs more effectively.

Proud to serve our audiences

The last days and weeks have been a blur of constant work and worry. The humanitarian emergency is only deepening in Afghanistan, while security continues to be a grave concern. Some of us have elected to remain behind; we are also exploring a model where we work alongside some of our colleagues who have been evacuated from Afghanistan to the UK.

We don’t know what the future holds, but we are proud to be serving our audiences with the trusted information they so desperately need, and to help make the emergency response in Afghanistan as effective as it can be.

Learn more about Â鶹ԼÅÄ Media Action’s work in Afghanistan or through JustGiving (leads to a third-party site).