Afghanistan

Key health facts

Life expectancy at birth: 50 years (women), 49 years (men)
Infant mortality per 1,000 births: 113
Doctors per 1,000 inhabitants: 0.3

Cap Anamur first got active in Afghanistan between 1987 and 1989. Since we returned in 2001 we have been incessantly running projects.

Situation in the country

For decades, Afghanistan has been a country with a complex security situation, in which rival militia groups try to use the vaguely defined power structures in the country’s 34 provinces to their advantage, while the central government’s enforcement hardly ranges beyond the capital Kabul. It is mostly the civilian population that suffers under the bloody conflict. Many people flee violence and lack of future perspective; especially those who manage to stem the financial cost of emigration. This brain drain affects mostly the category of professionals who could have had an impact in the development of the country’s civil society and infrastructure. Wide areas of the country are medically under-resourced; especially rural areas lack doctors, midwives and health structures. The long access routes to the few existing hospitals are not only dangerous, but also expensive and intractable for very sick patients or pregnant women.

Our goal

Improve provision of medical care, especially in the rural areas.

Our activities

Management of a three-year training programme for nurses, the students of which originate from rural areas and return to their villages in order to improve local medical care. In previous years, we had been offering two training courses for midwives and community health nurses. Their combined over 200 graduates are now deployed in rural regions.

In order to increase the number of medical structures and the portfolio of treatments in the country, we are setting up hospitals, running them for an initial three-year period and handing them over to the state’s health care system thereafter. So far we have erected six fully functional clinics.

We further support one of the few dialysis stations in the country, which with our help performs around 2,100 treatments per year.

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