Life-saving shelter and winterization support to the earthquake-affected population in Paktika Province In June 2022 the massive earthquake shocked Paktika and Khost provinces in Afghanistan. The buildings with less technical and earthquake-resistant construction measures with the extreme poverty of the residents was the main factor to dire damages made and the high toll of causalities and damages to the homes and source of income. The assessments show that at least there are more than 1,000 deaths and 3,000 injuries. Besides a dire need for basic needs and medical assistance, the earthquake-affected people are in need of shelter considering the upcoming winter. 

The shelter assistance should be based on Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) and Building Back Better (BBB) principles. People either made the homes traditionally with no regard to the earthquake-resistant aspects or they are too poor to retrofit their building in the course of time and their building loses the resistance due to natural factors. Also, a lack of knowledge of natural disasters such as earthquakes, rock fall, land slide and flash floods make people vulnerable to these natural disasters.    

The proposed project aims to provide shelter assistance to address the shelter needs of 181 households (1,267 participants) in the Barmal district of Paktika Province. The participants (beneficiaries) will be prioritized based on the level of need for the three pre-determined areas of the intervention (transitional shelter, heating assistance, and winter clothes) by the cluster rapid assessment data while Norwegian Afghanistan Committee (NAC) will conduct house to house verification of the project participants for final selection. Most of the population in this area is facing shelter damaged by the earthquake which increases morbidity and mortality of vulnerable people, both directly and due to impacts of living in open space or shared housing, WASH, and livelihoods. Homes are often destroyed, and basic household items are lost or damaged. Considering the high cost of shelter repairs, and the already negative net income of households, reconstruction comes at a high cost that may not be affordable for most people. Most affected households must choose between meeting basic needs and repairing/re-construct their shelters and are therefore unable to sustain any shock that severely damages or destroys their shelter.

The chosen modality for this assistance will be through direct conditional cash transfers to the needies 181 HHs, which will enable target participants to access USD 543,000 essential transitional shelter support along with USD 36,200 heating assistance and USD 13,394 winter clothes. Cash transfer gives people to the authority over selecting local material and improves  project participants' engagmement and ownershi[.The cash will be distributed in three installments (1st installment 40%, 2nd installment 40%, and 3rd installment 20%) after monitoring the progress of the work as per ES/NFI standard for shelter and at once for winter clothes and heating assistance with the last shelter installment, this process is followed by a couple of capacity building (DRR, building earthquake-resistant constructions using local and low-cost materials, and BBB training) This project aligns with NAC’s current programs to add emergency assistance to existing responses in “emergency cash assistance” to ensure that families and their children have access to shelter materials to cope with the harsh winter season. NAC will ensure a gender-sensitive selection process and accessible accountability mechanisms, and the gender-balanced field team will ensure easy access by both genders.

NAC will use Hawala over other modalities since the banking system is not fully functioning and some areas are not even covered by communication netweorksBased on the ES/NFI cluster guidance on shelter and Non-food Items (NFIs) assistance the value of the transfer per HH will be USD. 3,000 including labor costs for Average sized transitional shelter, USD 200 for heating assistance, and USD 74 for