Afghanistan Analysts Network – English

Economy, Development, Environment

When You Can’t Afford to Be Sick: From hakims and shrines to the operating table

Roxanna Shapour •

What happens when the medical treatment you need costs more money than you have? For many Afghans, illness comes with an impossible calculation. Paying for healthcare places a heavy burden on households, with patients and their families usually forced to cover costs out of their own pockets. For those faced with medical bills they cannot […]

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What Affordable Means in Today’s Afghanistan: Choosing what to give up and what to hold on to

Jawed Neshat • Roxanna Shapour •

What happens when a family that once enjoyed a comfortable life can no longer afford the things it once took for granted? This is the situation for many Afghan households still struggling in the wake of the economic collapse of 2021 and 2022 when many lost their jobs and yet prices continue to rise and […]

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The Daily Hustle: How one mother cares for her family through sickness, hunger and debt

Rama Mirzada • Roxanna Shapour •

In Afghanistan, years of conflict, economic collapse, and rising poverty have left hundreds of thousands of families struggling to survive. For those already on the brink, a single illness can be life-altering, pushing the household into crisis and making even the most basic necessities, such as bread, cooking oil, or school uniforms, unaffordable. In this […]

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The Daily Hustle: Building a business in Kabul one stitch at a time

Hamid Pakteen • Roxanna Shapour •

In Kabul’s Timur Shahi area, tailoring is serious business. Rows of shopfronts compete for customers. One marvels at how so many tailors, offering basically the same service, stay in business in such close proximity. But they do. Each tailor has his own loyal customers who have been with him for years, even generations. In this instalment […]

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The Daily Hustle: At Nawruz and Eid al-Fitr, a shopkeeper reflects on high food prices

Hamed Pakteen • Roxanna Shapour •

In a rare twist of the calendar, the first day of the Afghan New Year, Nawruz, came in the last ten days of Ramadan. These are both joyous occasions. Yet, in this instalment of the Daily Hustle, Hamed Pakteen has visited Mandawi, the busy central market in the heart of Kabul, which is filled with traders […]

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The Daily Hustle: How one woman blocked from teaching now runs a thriving tailoring business 

Rohullah Sorush • Roxanna Shapour •

In this instalment of The Daily Hustle, AAN’s Rohullah Sorush hears from a woman who did most of her growing up under the first Islamic Emirate which banned girls of all ages from going to school. She came late to education, but strove to be a good student and managed to graduate from high school […]

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The Daily Hustle: The day labourer and his wife who took in a widow and her six children

Ali Mohammad Sabawoon • Roxanna Shapour •

Some tales of generosity and compassion, of tragedy, heartache and life-changing decisions, span the generations. One such story is Ruzi Khan’s, a day labourer from Helmand province, who has opened his home to a destitute widow and her six young children. While the widow is his distant cousin, her late husband was the son of […]

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The Daily Hustle: The trials and tribulations of being a street vendor in Kabul

Sayed Asadullah Sadat • Roxanna Shapour •

For anyone who has spent any time in Kabul, handcart sellers and street vendors are a familiar sight, as they walk around the city hawking their wares from dusk to dawn trying to eke out a meagre living for their families. Street vendors say that more and more young Afghans have been joining their ranks, […]

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The Daily Hustle: Women take to street peddling to feed their families

Sayed Asadullah Sadat • Roxanna Shapour •

After the Taleban came to power in August 2021, the flow of international funds into the country that helped prop up the economy declined precipitously, and a significant number of people lost their jobs. Women, facing new legal restrictions on work from the Islamic Emirate, have been hit disproportionately hard by unemployment. With few options […]

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The Daily Hustle: Being a widow in Afghanistan

Roxanna Shapour •

The word most often used by Afghans to refer to widows is bisarparast (without someone to take care of you). In Afghanistan’s highly patriarchal society, where men are expected to be the breadwinners and opportunities for women to work are relatively few, being a widow is likely to be socially and economically precarious. They are often stigmatised, […]

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The Daily Hustle: How to survive a winter in Kabul

Roxanna Shapour •

Winters in Kabul are always difficult, and this year was no exception – with temperatures dropping well below zero and heavy snowfall. The snow turns the unpaved secondary roads where most Kabulis live into rivers of mud, making it difficult for people to get around. But if there’s little snow – increasingly the case because […]

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The Daily Hustle: Going to the bank

Roxanna Shapour • Rama Mirzada •

In the wake of the Taleban takeover in August 2021, the Afghan banking system, which up to then had been linked to the global banking network, collapsed. Reportedly very little money had been left in the treasury, and then overnight, the United States stopped flying in dollars, the central bank’s reserves held in the US […]

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