A year on from the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan takeover in Kabul, Afghanistan is gripped by “cascading crises”, including a crippled economy that humanitarian aid alone cannot address, according to a new report from the UN Development Programme (UNDP) on Wednesday.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has recently said that the Afghan economy has suffered a catastrophic fall in the last year, projecting that up to 97 percent of the population may be at risk of sinking below the poverty line by next year, unless a response to the country’s political and economic crises is urgently launched.

Kanni Wignaraja, the director of UNDP for Asia-Pacific said Wednesday that in less than a year, Afghanistan’s 10-year economic gains have been lost.

UNDP report said that the already-declining regular economy, as opposed to the black market, lost nearly $5 billion after August 2021 and is reversing “in 12 months what had taken 10 years to accumulate.”

Wignaraja has added that one in five children is at risk of acute malnutrition, especially in southern Afghanistan.

However, IEA’s Ministry of Economy said that if the world wanted Afghanistan to get out of the bad economic situation, it should cooperate with Afghanistan in establishing economic infrastructure.

Based on the UN report, by the middle of 2022 in Afghanistan, nearly 700,000 jobs, which were mostly occupied by women, have vanished.

“Nearly 700,000 jobs have vanished, said UNDP, further threatening a population reeling from impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, conflict, drought, and war in Ukraine.”

“The Afghan people have been relentlessly subjected to extremely difficult circumstances. They have survived numerous challenges in the last 40 years and shown enormous resilience”, the report added.

Although the Islamic Emirate has not reacted to this UN report so far, it had previously called the statistics provided by international relief organizations far from reality.