Special Trust Fund for Afghanistan (STFA) supports programming in the areas of socio-economic recovery for building social cohesion and protect critical livelihoods while strengthening links to peace and humanitarian actions, including basic human needs.

The Fund will serve as an inter-agency mechanism to enable donors to channel their resources and coordinate their support for the ABADEI (Area-based Approach for Development Emergency Initiatives) Strategy. The Fund is open to all UN Agencies, Funds and Programmes (UN AFPs). Currently, 14 UN agencies have signed the Memorandum of Understanding for the Special Trust Fund for Afghanistan. The list will be further expanded to bring in additional expertise, experience, and resources to joint initiatives.

The ABADEI Strategy’s joint programmes will complement the humanitarian response to meet the needs of people across multiple areas of vulnerability and enhance short-term resilience by preserving the ability of individuals and communities to cope with the impacts of the conflict, and the economic and public health crisis. The four thematic windows for the ABADEI Strategy will therefore work in complementarity with the Afghanistan Humanitarian Fund and the Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) guided by United Nations Transitional Engagement Framework (TEF) for Afghanistan, the overarching strategic planning document for the UN system’s assistance launched in 2022, focusing mostly on implementing TEF outcomes 2, “By the end of 2022, essential services are sustained that address basic human needs for the people in Afghanistan” and 3, “By the end of 2022, Afghanistan will preserve social investments and community-level systems essential to meeting basic human needs, protect gains to the SDGs, and develop scenarios for future engagement”.

The Fund’s activities will cover eight (8) regions of Afghanistan (Western, Eastern, Central, North Eastern, Central Highlands, Northern, Southern, and South Eastern) provisioned under ABADEI Strategy and other sectoral programmes (Health, Energy, Private Sector Recovery, Unconditional Cash Transfers, and Agriculture and Rural Community Livelihoods) for years 2022 and 2023. In December 2021, the Fund’s Steering Committee approved joint programme initiation plans for Northern and Southern regions of Afghanistan to be implemented for the first quarter of the year before eight regional joint programmes are fully developed and implemented in the eight regions of Afghanistan.