Afghanistan Uses U.N. Program as Blueprint for Self-Governance

As they do almost every year, winter rains swept down the valley where this farming village lies, flooding the Panshjir River, washing away a makeshift dam and irrigation grid, and wreaking the kind of havoc that orchard and wheat growers here have long had to contend with.

In years past, the villagers would have sat back and waited, confident that a gung-ho aid agency, a paternalistic warlord or mullah, or a put-upon wheat baron downstream would eventually step up to replace the water system with one just as flimsy, thereby solving their problem -- until the next winter.

Like many of Afghanistan’s dispossessed, war-weary and desperately poor people, the residents of this community of 300 were used to letting more powerful forces make the big decisions that affected their lives.

But in February, the people of Malaspa took a bold, even radical, step. They formed a town council and decided among themselves how to solve their problem. They voted to use a $20,000 government grant to build a new dam that should withstand any flooding next year and finally bring electricity to their village 120 miles north of Kabul, the Afghan capital.

The villagers followed a pilot grant-and-governance program developed by a United Nations agency called the Center for Human Settlements, or Habitat. The government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai is so taken with the program that it has adopted it as a blueprint for bringing democratic institutions to about 20,000 villages nationwide -- a project dubbed the National Solidarity Program.

Under program guidelines, villages will receive grants of up to $20,000 -- but with one big catch. Townspeople have to decide communally and openly how to spend the money, usually through elected 15-member “development councils.”

The government hopes that the impact of the program reaches beyond one-shot spending decisions. Karzai and international authorities in Afghanistan would like to help create democratic institutions that will take root in places where guns, money and ethnicity have been the usual rulers.

For the first time in anyone’s memory, Malaspans are acting as a polity, holding open weekly meetings and using the forum to work out age-old feuds.

“The first effect of the program is that it has united us, and we never were before. Now we get together every week and talk about our problems. We try to solve them,” said Abdul Qudus, a 60-year-old council member.

Programs like this have been successful in Indonesia, Brazil and the Philippines, but on a smaller scale. Karzai’s administration, by contrast, hopes that its program also will build respect for the central government, which not only will dole out funds, but supervise local decision-making. Building government recognition is a tall order in a country where, outside Kabul, the central authority is perceived as a shadowy entity at best, vastly outweighed in importance by regional warlords and nongovernmental relief and development agencies.

Initially, the National Solidarity Program will be funded mainly by the World Bank and donor nations. But the hope is that nongovernmental relief and reconstruction agencies can be persuaded to channel some of the cash they earmark for Afghan projects through the new program. That would allay the government grievance that aid agencies too often answer only to themselves.

Last year, only 16% of the $1.8 billion that Afghanistan received in aid and donations was managed by the government. The rest was spent directly by the agencies and donor nation.

“The management of these funds should be in the hands of the institution that manages the country, and that’s the central government,” said Deputy Finance Minister Abdul Salam Rahimy. “Getting a free fish doesn’t solve our problems. We have to learn how to fish.”

Of the Karzai government’s projected $550-million budget this fiscal year, about $200 million looks likely to be spent on the National Solidarity Program and the National Emergency Employment Program. Those funds will come from multinational sources but be administered by Karzai officials.

The employment program will address Afghans’ urgent need for cash by paying tens of thousands of the poor a daily wage to participate in public works projects. National Solidarity is meant to concern itself with longer-term local development and governance, such as infrastructure projects and the decision-making process by which they are defined.

Whether National Solidarity succeeds will depend on whether Karzai can persuade not only donor agencies but the multitude of aid agencies here to channel funds through the program. That is proving a hard sell because it means that those agencies must give up spending control -- as well as the glory for projects that would otherwise be completed under their aegis.

The risks involved already have been enough to discourage some potential donors from signing on. There is, for example, the danger that “elites” -- be they warlords, mullahs or landowners -- could gain undue influence over the local councils through intimidation or bribery. There is also the physical problem of getting money to remote areas of the country.

The sheer scale of the program, which aims to cover all 32 provinces and as many as 20,000 communities, also is daunting. The government will need to find and train 3,000 administrators not just to give instructions and monitor the system but to sort through local disputes.

“This is a leap of faith by the government and by the agencies that participate. But it gets down to what are you here for -- the common good of Afghanistan, for people, or for business, your own institutional survival?” said Samantha Reynolds, a U.N. Habitat chief technical advisor who helped develop the National Solidarity model.

The example of Malaspa, which seems to be relishing its new cohesion, might persuade some aid agencies that are on the fence. Since its council was formed late last year, the body has been able to solve a seven-year dispute over a piece of property that was claimed by rival tribes, a dispute that on occasion had led to rock-throwing melees.

The council members hit upon a solution that satisfied all parties. They decided to donate the site for a new school.

“Before there was war, and making any kind of decision here was difficult,” Qudus said. “Now we’re serving our own people and having fun.”