Community-based National Solidarity Programme showing results

Almost every villager in Guzara - including children and elders - has been engaged in intensive work to construct a girls school, in an attempt to complete the building before the academic year starts in the spring, as part of the National Solidarity Programme (NSP). After several months of planning and work, communities are taking major strides in the Afghan government's US $600 million intensive rehabilitation scheme which was launched in mid-2003 in a bid to develop the capacity of communities, through democratically elected local councils, to identify, plan, manage and monitor their own reconstruction and development models. "We have proven to be faster and more reliable than reconstruction organisations. We have completed constructing 80 per cent of this 12-room building by ourselves in just two months," Fazil Karim, a community representative in Gushmir village near the western provincial capital of Herat told IRIN. Gushmir girls' school is one of the first actual community results of the country's first ever community implemented programme - NSP - which is an initiative of the Afghan Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development (MRRD) to promote development beyond Kabul and to involve rural populations in the process of change. The three-year programme is expected to address around 7,000 villages across the country in the first year with allocations of $10,000 to $60,000 per village based on size of the local population. It is planned to cover every village of Afghanistan in three years time. "In the first year, the programme is addressing 97 districts across the country that have been selected based on vulnerability data in terms of severity of drought impact and the number of internally displaced persons and returnees," Abdul Wahid Hamidi, who is in charge of the NSP at MRRD, told IRIN. According to MRRD officials, the NSP has obtained an initial budget of $160 million for its first year with grants from the World Bank and other international donors. While the balance has yet to be covered, Hamidi remained confident that the multimillion-dollar project would not face funding problems as many donors had shown an interest. Hamidi said each village had assigned development councils composed of men and women villagers, and the identified projects were selected through a democratic election, a process which is also seen as a preparation for the national elections to be held in mid-2004. Like many other villages in the country, those in Gushmir are suffering from the lack of a health centre, irrigation water and environmental problems that are often underlined as top reconstruction priorities. But Bibi Coco, a 58-year-old widow and head of Gushmir NSP women's council, told IRIN that the construction of a girls school, which did not exist in the village before, was accepted by a majority of votes despite many other essential needs. "It was a proposal by the women's Shura [council] and fortunately villagers agreed to prioritise education as the most essential need," the mother of nine said. She noted that most of the other members of her women's council were illiterate housewives. "We do not want our daughters to suffer like us," she said. Even though managing a big project like Gushmir girls school and dealing with tens of thousands of dollars looks a difficult and challenging task for a rural community, particularly ensuring efficiency and accountability, the villagers said they had established competitive mechanisms and that every villager was informed of all steps taken in the project. "It is more than accountability and openness. We announce the price list of construction materials, labour or contractors' fees on the walls of all mosques in the village before we take any action," Karim noted, adding that while the development councils were accountable to the MRRD's NSP, they were supported and monitored by other MRRD-hired NGOs. "We are not given the second instalment unless we report and justify our expenses." In almost every village, people have selected schools and women's income-generation projects as among their top priorities. According to UN-Habitat (United Nations Human Settlement Programme), which is one of the 22 MRRD-hired organisations overseeing this programme, the NSP was developing community institutions and laying the foundations for a long-term strengthening of local governance. "This time democracy has started from rural areas where men and women vote to decide on the long-term development of their village themselves," Sayed Saadullah Wahab, a provincial manager of Habitat, told IRIN.