A Quiet Revolution in Kabul: When €45 Changed the Odds

Kabul, late 2022.

THE CITY IS RESTLESS.

Fruit sellers push carts through dust-choked streets, their calls drowned out by the honk of battered Toyotas. Apartment blocks rise, half-finished, beside ruins left to crumble. At the centre of it all: women. Many of them the heads of household since the Taliban takeover, left to feed children in an economy where jobs have evaporated and food prices doubled.

Hunger here is not dramatic, not captured in a single image. It is a quiet, corrosive fact of daily life. Meals skipped. Children are put to bed early so they don’t feel the ache in their stomachs.

It was into this silence that a small alliance decided to intervene. And they chose to do so differently.

IMAGE: Tony Di Zinno

The Experiment: Cashless Relief

Instead of trucks laden with flour or endless queues outside NGO compounds, the intervention arrived as a QR code on a card. Every two weeks, for two months, vulnerable women received AFN 4,000, about €45, transferred to a digital wallet accessible even on the simplest of phones.

The mechanics were deceptively straightforward:

Who funded: Uplift Afghanistan, a women-led non-profit, secured backing from a private philanthropic foundation; evaluation support came from the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office via J-PAL.

Who executed: Afghan Community Development Councils identified the women most at risk; HesabPay, a local fintech platform, handled digital transfers and merchant reimbursements.

How it worked: Women attended small onboarding sessions, left with a QR card and basic instructions, and could buy food the same day. No cash changed hands. No middlemen took a cut.

The numbers, when they came, told a remarkable story:

• 99.75% adoption: Almost every woman used her vouchers, despite low digital literacy.

• Meals restored: Families skipped nearly one fewer day of meals per week. The share of households eating two meals daily rose by 9.3 percentage points.

• Better diets: Rice and bread were joined by beans, dairy and chicken. Children tasted foods they hadn’t seen in months.

• Emotional impact: Women were 33.5% more likely to say their economic situation had improved, and 28% more likely to describe themselves as happy. In Afghanistan, where joy is rationed, that figure is profound.

• Efficiency: Delivery cost just $0.067 per dollar transferred, less than half the World Food Programme’s global average for cash-based aid.

The project itself was small - just over 2,400 households in Kabul, Herat, and Mazar-i-Sharif. But the significance lay in the infrastructure it created.

Each merchant onboarded, each woman trained to use a QR card, strengthened an Afghan ecosystem for cashless aid. Within months, the World Food Programme began adopting the model, expanding it first to tens of thousands, and now over 100,000 families.

Here was proof that private capital, combined with credible intelligence and local platforms, could move fast and build the rails that international institutions could later run on.

But numbers rarely capture the lived experience. For the women who participated, this was more than sustenance. Surveys showed that over 90% made the spending decisions themselves.

In a context where women’s agency is systematically eroded, deciding whether to buy beans or milk was quietly revolutionary. The intervention did not only fill plates; it gave women control, however fleeting, over their family’s survival.

The Platform Behind the Aid

HesabPay - Afgani digital payments software

HesabPay: Afghan-founded, QR-based payments system, operable even on basic phones via USSD.

Design edge: No cash-out option, minimising risk of diversion or coercion.

Merchants: Local shops integrated, keeping money circulating through Afghan supply chains.

Security: Names checked against sanctions lists; no evidence of taxation or extortion.

Lessons for the World of Aid

This is not a silver bullet. Digital aid requires phone access, network coverage, and stocked merchants. But the Afghan case demonstrates three lessons worth carrying forward:

• Speed is posssible

  When bureaucracy is stripped away, families received life-saving support within weeks.

• Dignity matters

  Relief designed with discretion and autonomy can improve well-being beyond calories.

• Private capital is catalytic

  A modest foundation grant proved what was possible; institutions scaled it.

It is tempting to see €45 as insignificant in the grand scale of humanitarian budgets. Yet, as one Afghan mother put it to researchers, “It was the difference between my children eating, or not.”

Why This Matters to Candide

Candide Strategic Resilience was founded on a conviction: that intelligence, convening, and decisive capital can bridge the gap where institutions falter.

The Afghan pilot is a perfect illustration of our model:

• Intelligence: Local councils identified those in need with precision.

• Convening: NGOs, fintech, and funders aligned around a simple design.

• Action: Transfers launched within weeks.

• Impact: Measured in meals, dignity, and scale-up.

This is not theory, it is practice - and it is precisely what Candide exists to replicate.

Humanitarianism often presents itself in grandiose imagery: convoys, conferences, pledges. But sometimes the most transformative interventions arrive without fanfare - as a quiet SMS on a battered phone, a code that unlocks rice and beans for dinner, and a mother’s relief in knowing her children will eat tonight.

€45, delivered well, did more in Afghanistan than millions pledged badly elsewhere. In a world of accelerating crises, that should give us pause, and perhaps, direction.

Candide Strategic Resilience

Where intelligence meets impact. For those who won’t sit on the sidelines.