An Afghan-led research organization has launched a new aid tracker showing that only about 9% of roughly $8 billion in humanitarian assistance paid for Afghanistan since August 2021 can be publicly traced beyond the first recipient, highlighting what researchers describe as a major gap in disclosure over aid spending.
The Kabul Institute unveiled its Afghanistan Aid Tracker during an online event on Thursday, saying the platform is designed to help Afghans, journalists, researchers and donors track publicly available information on international humanitarian funding for the country.
According to the institute, $721.9 million — about 9% of the $8 billion recorded as paid since August 2021 — can be traced through publicly available data beyond the first recipient organization. The remaining 91% drops from public view at that stage, according to the tracker.
The institute stressed that the finding does not mean the money was lost, stolen or misused. Rather, it reflects the limits of publicly available information that can be used to follow funding as it moves through the humanitarian system.
“Just because we don’t see the money, it’s not an accusation that the money was misused,” development consultant Layma Murtaza said during the event.
The tracker also identified $1.42 billion across 316 payments in which recipients were recorded as confidential. Researchers said they found no program-level spending data published in a machine-readable public source that would allow the public to systematically track how funds were ultimately spent.
Naweed Kawusi, a senior fellow at the Kabul Institute, said the tracker was intended to give Afghans and others a publicly accessible record of humanitarian funding and allow users to follow individual donors, agencies and payments for as long as the public data permit.
“The public data shows you that only 9% of the $8 billion, which is equivalent to $721.9 million, can be traced past the first recipient,” Kawusi said.
The Kabul Institute describes itself as an Afghan-owned and Afghan-led organization. Officials said the tracker draws information from more than 21 online sources and distinguishes among funding that was pledged, committed and paid. Its data were updated through Sept. 30, 2026.
Shoaib Alami, the institute’s head of partnerships, said researchers shared information and findings with relevant agencies and authorities named in the report before publication and sought their confirmation.
He said those exchanges helped researchers refine their methodology and address discrepancies among publicly available sources.
Alami said the tracker was designed as a central source of information for researchers, students and journalists, while also allowing donors, UN agencies and aid organizations to examine funding patterns and identify gaps.
Omar Samad, a former Afghan diplomat and senior fellow, said the significance of the research lies in determining how much the public can establish about aid flows rather than attempting to prove wrongdoing.
“The study … is not about proving corruption,” Samad said. “It’s not about defending aid agencies. And it’s not about advancing … a political narrative.”
“It’s about asking whether we can follow the money and understand its impact and improve the system,” he added.
Samad said humanitarian accountability should meet three basic standards: traceability of money from donors through implementing partners, transparency about what was delivered and how funds were spent, and independent measurement of results.
The public, taxpayers, beneficiaries and donors should ultimately be able to determine who received the money, what was done with it and what changed as a result, he said.
But Samad also cautioned that Afghanistan presents an unusually difficult environment for full transparency. He cited sanctions, political constraints surrounding engagement with Taliban authorities, security considerations and the need in some cases to protect identities or sensitive funding arrangements.
“Afghanistan is not a normal case,” Samad said, describing it as one of the world’s most politically constrained and operationally complex environments for humanitarian assistance.
The event also highlighted a sharp decline in international assistance to Afghanistan since the early years following the collapse of the former republic.
Iqbal Mohib, a researcher, said humanitarian assistance had fallen from about $3.2 billion in 2022 to around $600 million in 2026.
“Since 2021, we have lost almost 90% of the aid that was coming to the country,” Mohib said, contrasting current levels with the substantially larger amounts Afghanistan received before 2021.
Mohib said the decline means assistance is increasingly focused on immediate survival rather than development or broader programs aimed at reducing poverty.
“We’re not achieving any development here,” he said. “We’re really working towards survival of the population.”
He pointed to food assistance, basic health services, nutrition and vaccinations as examples of essential programs affected by declining funding, saying hundreds of health facilities have closed in recent years as funding dried up.
Mohib also challenged a widespread perception that humanitarian assistance since 2021 had simply involved large amounts of cash being delivered into Afghanistan without an established system for distribution and oversight.
“This is not how aid was done in Afghanistan,” he said.
He said there were processes for distributing and monitoring aid, even if the publicly available information does not provide a complete picture of where the money ultimately went.
Murtaza similarly said records can exist at several stages of the humanitarian process, including the identification and registration of families, cash transfers and the logging of deliveries, while much of the intermediate movement of funding remains difficult for the public to see.
She said the lack of visibility becomes particularly significant when money moves from large international organizations to smaller implementing partners.
Drawing on her experience managing aid programs in Afghanistan and other conflict settings, Murtaza said better technology alone would not resolve the transparency problem.
She said common reporting rules, quality checks and verification procedures are needed before technology can effectively improve the tracking of aid.
Samad said greater communication and coordination among donors, U.N. agencies, aid organizations and Taliban authorities would be needed to improve transparency while recognizing the constraints under which humanitarian organizations operate.
“In any humanitarian response, the public has a right to know where the money goes,” he said.
The Kabul Institute said its tracker currently covers aid data from 2021 through 2026. It plans to expand the project to examine assistance provided before 2021.
Institute officials said the tracker is intended to establish what can be independently verified through public records and show where that trail ends — not to conclude that money that cannot be traced through publicly available data was improperly spent.
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