About 25,000 children in Kunar province are still living in makeshift tents six months after a devastating earthquake struck the region, international aid group Save the Children said on Thursday.
According to its report, families are using traditional wood- or coal-burning heaters inside tarpaulin shelters to stay warm, which increases the risk of fire. It added that reconstruction work in the mountainous area has hardly started, and the destruction in some villages is so severe that they are unlikely to be rebuilt.
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The quake also badly damaged the education system. More than half of nearly 1,300 classrooms assessed were either completely or partially destroyed. Even before the disaster, around 50,000 primary school-aged children in Kunar — the worst-hit province — were already out of school, the report noted.
A strong 6.0-magnitude earthquake hit eastern Afghanistan on August 31 last year, causing widespread devastation mainly in Kunar and becoming one of the deadliest natural disasters in the country’s recent history.