300,000 CHILDREN FACE ILLNESS, EVEN DEATH FROM AFGHANISTAN’S FREEZING WINTER CONDITIONS - 31 Dec 2020
Coldwave
How the score is calculated
The score starts at 8. It adds points from recorded affected, deaths, displaced and casualty counts, plus terms found in the story title, event type or status. For each count, only its highest matching band is used.
- Affected people
- 1–999: +5 · 1,000–9,999: +12 · 10,000–99,999: +20 · 100,000–999,999: +28 · 1 million+: +35
- Deaths
- 1–9: +8 · 10–99: +14 · 100–999: +22 · 1,000+: +30
- Displaced people
- 1–9,999: +6 · 10,000–99,999: +12 · 100,000+: +18
- Casualties
- 100 or more: +8
- Story wording
- +10 for terms such as catastrophe, famine, war, conflict, major earthquake, mass casualty or critical. Otherwise, +5 for active, ongoing, emergency, outbreak, cyclone or hurricane.
Score bands: Watch 0–24 · Moderate 25–49 · High 50–74 · Critical 75–100. Scores are capped at 100. Missing or unparseable figures add no points.
This is a rule-based WorldsAid triage indicator, not an official or independently validated classification. It does not account for recency or local context, and it can understate events with incomplete reporting. Check the linked sources.
Historical record
Status: CLOSED · Imported 2026-10-07
Closed for this historical import at the site owner’s request; not a new assessment of current conditions.
In brief
- What happenedKabul – More than 300,000 Afghan children face freezing winter conditions that could lead to illness, in the worst cases death, without proper winter clothing and heating, warns Save the Children.[i] The schools are closed until March in the coldest parts of Afghanistan where the temperature can plummet as low as minus 27 degrees Celsius.
- How many affectedThe cited sources do not yet provide a reliable affected-person total.
- What help is neededWe must go from home to home to deliver thick coats and blankets.” The ongoing conflict has also destroyed many homes and forced thousands of children to shelter in camps for the homeless.
What changed
First retained snapshot
No earlier verified snapshot is present in the recovered dataset. This record remains available as the historical baseline.
Situation
Kabul – More than 300,000 Afghan children face freezing winter conditions that could lead to illness, in the worst cases death, without proper winter clothing and heating, warns Save the Children.[i] The schools are closed until March in the coldest parts of Afghanistan where the temperature can plummet as low as minus 27 degrees Celsius. As Chris Nyamandi, Save the Children’s Country Director in Afghanistan explains, this is a terrible blow because the classroom is often the only source of warmth for children during the winter. “The early snow in the northern parts of Afghanistan where we work has impacted children particularly badly. The most vulnerable children are those whose schools have shut because of the worsening winter conditions. Their families don’t have the money to buy winter clothing. Instead children are forced to huddle at home to escape the bitter cold.” “It also means it is more difficult for us to reach these children to provide them with winter clothing. We must go from home to home to deliver thick coats and blankets.” The ongoing conflict has also destroyed many homes and forced thousands of children to shelter in camps for the homeless. There they risk hunger, disease, including COVD-19, even death from freezing temperatures. Twelve-year-old Rohina* lives in a camp for people forced to flee their homes in Balkh province. She attends Save the Children supported community-based education classes. She said, “We are poor and are living under open sky. Me and my siblings are not able to sleep for the night because of the cold. How someone can learn like this?” “The situation is bleak for children forced to live in camps in places like Balkh province. It is already very cold in this northern province with overnight temperatures as low as minus ten. But it will get much colder before March,” said Mr Nyamandi. “Here, and in camps in other parts of Afghanistan, plastic sheeting and the clothes they wear are often all that separates them from the freezing temperatures. “For thousands of children the Afghan winter is a time of grim survival,” added Mr Nyamandi. In response, Save the Children will provide: Winter kits to more than 100,000 families in 12 of Afghanistan's 34 provinces. These winter kits include fuel and a heater, blankets and winter clothes for children including coats, socks, shoes, hats and Vaseline Shelter repair kits for people made homeless by the fighting 12 weeks rent for families at risk of homelessness
Linked charities and agencies
WorldsAid verification
A WorldsAid editor reviewed this record against 1 attributed source, cleaned feed formatting and checked the crisis, place and reporting date. No reliable human-impact total was promoted where the source did not provide one. Earlier observations remain in the evidence history instead of being silently overwritten.
What we knew when
- WorldsAid record entered the retained historical dataset.
- Last verification represented by this immutable snapshot.
Earlier figures are never replaced by later values; additional observations are retained as new ledger entries.
Provenance
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Cached dataset: worldsai_drup771.sql.gz
Verified
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