ISLAMABAD: A UN agency will provide Rs12,000 ($75) as cash relief to each one of the 36,000 Afghan refugee families affected by the ongoing lockdown in the country, Pakistan’s Minister for States and Frontier Regions (Safron), Shehryar Khan Afridi, said in a statement released on Saturday.
“Despite financial difficulties, Pakistan’s government will keep supporting the Afghan refugees,” he said, adding that Prime Minister Imran Khan was making an all-out effort to support the initiative.
His comments were part of an address to the refugees at a camp in Islamabad on Saturday, where he added that the campaign will be spearheaded by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), without divulging more details as to when the cash-relief program would be launched.
Earlier, on April 24, the UNHCR had said that it had adjusted its measures and undertaken immediate actions to respond to the COVID-19 emergency in Pakistan.
“We remain deeply concerned by the pandemic and the impact that it’s having on the lives of refugees in Pakistan and the communities that host them,” Iain Hall, UNHCR Deputy Representative, had said at the time, adding that they were going “the extra mile” to support the neediest “in an already vulnerable community.”
Pakistan is host to more than 1.4 million registered Afghan refugees who reside in 54 camps across the country, mostly in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan provinces which border Afghanistan.
However, government estimates say that there are over one million undocumented refugees in the country as well.
