Afghanistan: After Action Review: Eastern Region Earthquake

Country: Afghanistan Source: UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Please refer to the attached file. A 6+ magnitude earthquake struck eastern Afghanistan on 31 August 2025, followed by multiple aftershocks in the days that followed. The earthquake primarily affected Kunar and Nangarhar provinces, causing fatalities , injuries, widespread damage to homes and public infrastructure, displacement and major disruption in remote mountainous areas. The humanitarian response was implemented in an extremely constrained physical access environment characterized by landslides, damaged roads, difficult terrain, recurring aftershocks, weak telecommunications including a 48-hour nationwide outage, winter onset, and restrictions affecting Afghan women staff access to UN compounds. Despite these conditions, humanitarian actors mounted a large-scale emergency response that delivered life-saving assistance rapidly and at significant scale. Rapid donor funding, including an emergency Central Emergency Relief Fund (CERF) allocation complemented by a reserve allocation by the Afghanistan Humanitarian Fund (AHF), together with early resource mobilization efforts, notably the EU Humanitarian Air Bridge (EUHAB), which operated five humanitarian cargo shipments between 19 and 29 September 2025, were widely viewed by responders as critical enablers of the response. A detailed infographic timeline of the response is included in the annex . Following the conclusion of the response, the Inter-Cluster Coordination Team (ICCT) initiated an After-Action Review (AAR) to assess the humanitarian response to the 31 August 2025 eastern region earthquake across Nangarhar and Kunar provinces. The review examined operational coordination, response delivery, information management, l...

Original source: Relief Web