Livelihoods recovery in flood-affected households in Kandahar, Afghanistan The project aims to provide support to 37,105 flood-affected farmers and their HH members, in four districts of Kandahar province, who experienced losses in cash-crop agricultural production and subsistence agriculture and have not been able to recover since, following the floods in early 2019. DRC plans to provide livelihoods support through an integrated intervention involving capacity building, technical guidance, and the distribution of vouchers supporting recovery of agriculture, kitchen gardening, poultry and rolling out cash for fork assistance for land rehabilitation. In total, 2,000 flood-affected farmers will be provided with voucher for agricultural inputs complemented by training on best practices in agricultural production. Further, 800 women will be trained in kitchen gardening and receive vouchers which will allow them to purchase a required toolkit. 885 women will receive vouchers to procure poultry kits and will receive training on how to manage poultry coops. In addition, 26,500HH members will directly benefit from the previous activities. Cash will be provided to 6,920 unskilled labourers for rehabilitation of at least 850 jeribs of agricultural land. The Early Warning Early Action Report (FAO, June 2019) includes recommendations for interventions to be carried out to address acute needs of local communities and to mitigate major disaster risks to food security and agriculture. This intervention follows the recommendations, specifically by distributing vegetable kits and poultry, with a particular focus on women from flood affected households. The project focuses on off-season food production, and livelihood options diversification supported by the rehabilitation of agricultural land that has been destroyed by the recent floods. Kitchen gardening and poultry-related activities will be exclusively targeting women and aim at removing barriers preventing women from accessing the labour market. Project implementation will be led by the Livelihoods Team Leader under the line management of the Area Manager and with the support of Technical Coordinators. Female staff will be prioritized in the recruitment for the positions required to liaise with female beneficiaries. Male staff will be guided while to ensure a gender-balanced representation of beneficiaries and appropriate mainstreaming of gender-sensitive approaches in the project implementation. The general selection criteria for direct beneficiaries will be as follows: shelter damage (50% or more), damages to agricultural production (40% of land damaged) CSI (over 10) and FSC in the last quartile. Priority ranking/aggravating element will follow the common vulnerability factors: woman/elderly/child head of HH, presence of disability, large HH, etc. Discriminatory factors: land possession (agriculture). Following consultations and the agreement with the provincial Department of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock, DRC will use voucher assistance as preferred methodology. DRC will ensure that the cash is used for the purchase of agreed agricultural items and that farmers have access to high quality inputs from pre-identified suppliers, complying with technical standards for inputs. With the support from the DRC technical team, this modality also ensures that the beneficiaries are linked directly with markets and are able to navigate through a large number of input suppliers to identify those offering better quality products. It is expected that cash gained through cash for work modality can cover food and income gaps of the targeted individuals. Due to the highly volatile safety situation in Kandahar Province, DRC would like to retain the possibility to modify this intervention and use other forms of assistance cash or in kind distributions, should local conditions substantially change suddenly. The project timeline is set to follow the farming season: by distributing seeds in autumn farmers will be able to plant winter wheat and late vegetable varieties.