Last September, Dr. Awad Mataria sounded worried. The director of health systems at the World Health Organization’s Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean had just returned from a mission to Kabul to meet with other United Nations agencies, INGOs, international donors, and the Taliban to finalize a plan to revive Afghanistan's failing health systems — and things were not looking good.
The central conflict: “The Taliban has repeatedly emphasized that they would like to be engaged and to have ownership [over health programs] and to have even a stewardship, which is not something that we have been in full agreement with,” he told Devex at the time.
The Kabul mission followed an initial meeting in Doha in March 2022 to draw up a preliminary plan to guide foreign funding to address the immediate and growing health needs in Afghanistan. In the absence of an internationally recognized government, Taliban leaders are the de facto authorities after the fall of Kabul in August 2021. Getting them to agree on the plan was more than just diplomacy — they control access to the country, which is necessary for humanitarian assistance.