Foreigners in town mean jobs for some

Twenty year-old Kifayat runs up to a group of foreigners who have just arrived at Kabul Airport. "Do you need a translator?" he asks a German woman politely. "No thanks," she replies. "I'm sorry to have bothered you," says Kifayat, bowing his head slightly as he approaches the next person in line at the immigration counter. On this cold, sunny January morning, Kifayat was prepared to accept as little as US $30 a day, but was finding fewer and fewer customers. Wealthy journalists and television networks had arrived in droves after the defeat of the Taliban in November, followed by UN and aid agency staff coming to reopen offices and open new ones. Things for Kifayat had been better then. Kifayat is just one of several thousand Afghan youths trying to find a job - not with domestic local employers, but with the foreigners, who pay better wages. A challenge the Afghan government will face will be to retain the services of skilled personnel on the lookout for jobs with international aid organisations, which are expanding their presence in the capital, Kabul. Hundreds of NGOs, UN agencies, bilateral and multilateral donors, and diplomatic missions returned to Afghanistan together with their international staff after the rout of the hardline Taliban, who opposed the presence of foreigners in the country. But things may be looking up for people like Kifayat. Now that the Afghan interim administration is in place and the country has attracted unprecedented international attention, hope is burgeoning that the country may actually see some reconstruction and rehabilitation. What is happening now is also inspiring the impoverished and unemployed of Kabul with new hope. "Tens of thousands of people are unemployed in the city," Seyyed Salahuddin, a Kabul resident, told IRIN. "There are no jobs, though prospects are there - but there are no skills either," he said. Buoyed by pledges from the international community of up to US $4.5 billion towards the country's resuscitation, residents are hopeful that well-paying job opportunities are in the pipeline. "I have high hopes of getting a good job," Kifayat told IRIN, basing his optimism on his recent experience of working with foreigners as an interpreter. "I made US $100 a day, a Japanese news [network] hired me for a week," he said proudly, and dropped the names of a few other news organisations to bolster his credentials as an experienced interpreter. US $100 is a mind-boggling sum in a city where the average government monthly salary is US $50 - assuming that it is paid at all. Employees of 33 ministries were paid one month’s salary last week by the UN, for the first time in six months. "The job market is changing dramatically," a western aid worker told IRIN. "We are all looking to expand programmes, and for that we need good local staff," he said. Marketable skills are the key. Afghans who know foreign languages, have worked abroad or with foreign organisations are most likely to benefit from the new demand for local staff. Aid workers say there is inevitably competition among aid agencies to hire the best, while there is also a general understanding against poaching. That understanding, however, is under threat with pressure mounting to step up and expand aid work. "The non-governmental organisations have a general agreement on staff salary levels and not to poach staff from each other," a western aid worker said, but added: "The problem will become acute once more aid agencies come to the town." The World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and some other developmental financial institutions are expected to open offices and seek experienced national staff soon. "Anyone who speaks English, has computer skills and has some experience of administration can name his price," said the aid worker, who is having difficulties finding workers with the right skills. While tens of thousands may be unemployed in Kabul alone, they have little hope of obtaining the well-paying jobs. In fact, the dearth of qualified educated Afghans has prompted the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) to repatriate highly skilled Afghans for a limited period of time. In the middle of January, Abdul Hamid Mobarez was the first Afghan professional to return under an accord signed in early January between the IOM and Afghanistan's interim government. This is a programme aimed at enabling thousands of Afghan skilled workers and professionals to go home to help rebuild their country. Mobarez is one of 50 people who will be working for the interim authority until 3 July. He is the first of possibly thousands from the Afghan diaspora who wish to return and assist the new administration whom IOM's Return of Qualified Afghans (RQA) programme is ready to facilitate. Established in December after the demise of the Taliban, and based on an earlier programme launched two years ago for helping Afghans return from Pakistan, RQA is set to expand further. "We plan to return 1,500 people over the next two years, but we hope to assist more. The need and desire is definitely there," IOM programme coordinator, Daiva Vilkelyte, told IRIN in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. The RQA global database, supported by IOM missions worldwide, has already identified nearly 1,600 people wishing to return, 20 percent of whom are women. Amanullah, a 40 year-old Kabul resident, who lost half his family during the factional fighting in early 1992, is also looking for a job. With 10 years' experience of driving, general office work, and working for foreign NGOs, he is hopeful of getting a good position. "I have started distributing my applications. God willing, I will get a good job at a good salary," he said, but added that competition for good jobs would increase with the expected return of hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees from Iran, Pakistan and elsewhere. "We have potentially hundreds of thousands of people who may come back," Maki Shinohara, a spokeswoman for the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), told IRIN in Kabul. "Our return plan basically comes in three parts: the cross-border issues with Pakistan and Iran; assistance package for return, like transportation and how to reintegrate them back into the society; and a declaration of amnesty for the returning refugees," she said. Amanullah said many returning Afghans would have superior skills and experience which the aid agencies were looking for and might take jobs from those who had stayed through the worst of Afghanistan's troubled twenty years. "It will become tough. But let's see who returns and when," he added.