Relief Emergency Fundraiser for Afghanistan (REFA)

While it is a time of great uncertainty for most of us here in the United States, we are blessed to be able to stay home with access to basic necessities of life in order to curtail the spread of the Covid-19 virus. For millions of poverty-stricken Afghans, who feed their families on their daily earnings, staying home is an option they can not afford. Due to this lack of social distancing and an underdeveloped healthcare system, Afghanistan is in the middle of a crisis of a great magnitude. It is imperative that we as a community take immediate action to mobilize emergency aid and provide families with enough food to sustain themselves for at least a month in order to prevent a full-scale tragedy from taking place.

As a result, Mustafa Center has joined an initiative led by Afghan Community Empowerment and NETLINKS, in conjunction with other local and national organizations and businesses to start an ambitious fundraising effort with an ultimate goal of one million dollars. As the day to day reality on the ground deteriorates, REFA has already distributed a month's worth of food aid to more than 1,000 families so far. We have a network of over 200 volunteer staff with rapid-response capabilities in place that can shift their distribution efforts to those regions that are hit the hardest by the virus outbreak.

We have been a witness to a great number of fundraisers in the past days and weeks as individuals and organizations do their part to help raise funds. While we admire their sincerity and applaud their efforts, we feel we can make a bigger impact when working together. In the coming days, we will release a transparent system where every donor, partner, and organizer is able to track every aspect of the fundraising process, including the amount raised, what was purchased with the funds, and where and to who they were distributed to. This system will streamline the entire process and REFA will commit to sharing this valuable resource with any organization for all their efforts even beyond the Cover-19 response.