The price of bread in Kabul has doubled in a month. A labourer now earns less than the cost of a single meal. And across the country, fathers are making an impossible choice: sell a child or watch the family starve.
In the winter of 2023, the Taliban's takeover has accelerated an economic collapse that was already brutal. International aid has dried up, assets frozen, and trade links severed. The result is a poverty so deep that the poorest families are turning to child markets, not just in remote provinces but in the capital itself.
Habibullah, 45, a former construction worker from Kandahar, stands in a crowded square. He holds the hand of his seven-year-old daughter. “I never thought I would do this,” he says quietly. “But we have nothing. No food, no work. Her uncle tells me a family in Pakistan will take her, give her a home. Maybe she will eat there.” The price offered: 100,000 afghani – about £900.
This is not a rare occurrence. Aid workers report that in provinces like Herat, Badakhshan, and Baghlan, informal child sales have become a last-resort survival strategy. The buyers are often traffickers or families in neighbouring countries, and the children are destined for forced labour, marriage, or worse.
The economic data is stark. The World Food Programme says 95% of Afghans do not have enough to eat. The United Nations estimates that 97% of the population will be living in poverty this year. For many, the only asset left is a child.
“This is a quiet catastrophe,” says Maryam Akbari, a humanitarian worker in Mazar-i-Sharif. “The fathers who come to us are not bad men. They are men who have seen their other children die of hunger. They are men who have no choice. The law says it is illegal, but what is the law when your baby is crying for milk?”
The Taliban authorities have denied the scale of the crisis, blaming Western sanctions for the suffering. But their own policies have deepened the damage. Women banned from work, girls from school, and public sector salaries unpaid. The economy, heavily dependent on aid, has been gutted.
The UK government has pledged £385 million in humanitarian assistance for Afghanistan this year, but aid agencies say this is a fraction of what is needed. The collapse of the banking system makes it nearly impossible to get money to those who need it. Cash is scarce, and even basic transactions are broken.
In a makeshift shelter on the outskirts of Kabul, Zabiullah, a 52-year-old father of six, describes his own decision. He sold his ten-year-old son two weeks ago. “I cannot look at myself in the mirror,” he says, his hands trembling. “But I had two smaller children. They were so thin. They looked like ghosts. I chose the ones who had a chance.” He was paid 80,000 afghani. It lasted ten days.
Campaigners are calling for an immediate emergency cash injection into the Afghan economy, and for the international community to decouple humanitarian aid from political recognition of the Taliban. Without this, they say, the child markets will only grow.
“We are watching a generation being sold,” says Aisha Khoram, a former teacher now volunteering with a hunger relief group. “These children are not numbers. They are sons and daughters. And they are being lost every day.”
The fathers who sell them know this. They know it every time they count the money. Every time they walk home one child lighter. But the alternative is worse: watch them die slowly, one by one.
As winter deepens, the choice will come to more families. And the true cost of this collapse will be counted not in pounds or dollars, but in the lives of the children left behind.
