Why Afghanistan’s reserves remain stuck in Switzerland

Afghan state assets equivalent to a quarter of the country’s GDP sit frozen in a Swiss bank account. They are managed by a Geneva-based fund that has not released a single dollar since it was set up over two years ago. The money could be a financial lifeline for the Afghan economy. When the Taliban marched into the Afghan capital Kabul on August 15, 2021, Masuda Sultan knew it would be bad news, she just didn’t realise how bad. First, her bank in the United States refused to transfer money to Afghanistan that was funding her NGO, Women for Afghan Women, she was running at the time. Soon after, the country’s teachers’ union sought help from Sultan and other women’s rights advocates to lobby the World Bank to unfreeze aid from its Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF) and disburse the salaries of 220,000 female educators who had been unpaid for months. Then, Sultan learned that Afghanistan’s central bank was no longer able to access billions of dollars of its reserves, a vital ...