Afghanistan Analysts Network – English

Posts tagged: Aid

Aid

U.S. Winds Down Afghanistan Aid Program

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Wall Street Journal, 10 October 2012 The closure of already five of over two dozen NATO PRTs ‘is effectively turning off the money flow to Afghanistan’s provinces’, the Journal reports. Of the once millions-strong Commander’s Emergency Response Program funds for PRT commanders (the Nangarhar PRT spent $24 million on projects in the province in 2010) […]

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Prevalence of malnutrition in southern Afghanistan ‘shocking’

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Guardian, 4 September 2012 Emma Graham-Harrison looks beyond the military realm: ‘Around a third of young children in southern Afghanistan are acutely malnourished, with a level of deprivation similar to that found in famine zones, a government survey has found, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid that has been poured into […]

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Finances a Mystery at Kabul Conference

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IWPR, 1 May 2012 The search began with a missing generator. The machine, worth as much as 20,000 US dollars in Kabul, is said to have been bought with money donated by USAID for the Kabul International Conference in July 2010 that was attended by delegates from more than 70 countries. Spending on the conference […]

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U.S. soldier’s gift to Afghan workers at her base underscores divide

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Washington Post, 24 April 2012 Another heart-breaking story about a good intentioned (female) US soldier who failed with her private form of aid.

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Guest blog: Working in Aid: donor rule, funding flows, and awkward ‘no’s

Sarah Han •

Criticism of top-down development approaches find common cause in Afghanistan, where projects are often envisioned and implemented without due attention paid to realities on the ground. Here, AAN guest blogger SARAH HAN shares some of her personal experience of the oft-frustrating world of donor-NGO relations. Her paper ‘Legal Aid in Afghanistan: Context and Challenges,’ released […]

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Legal Aid in Afghanistan: Contexts, Challenges and the Future

Sarah Han •

In this new briefing paper, lawyer and legal aid expert Sarah Han looks at the historical, legal and political context to the provision of legal aid and describes the efforts of the international community over the past five years to developing funding streams for the accused. The author commends the modest but significant improvements in […]

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Why the aid drawdown in Afghanistan could be a good thing

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IRIN, 26 March 2012 The gradual drawdown of US-NATO troops, and the planned handover of full security responsibilities to Afghan forces in 2014, has had the aid community worried about a corresponding drop in aid funds. But many aid workers also see the transition as an opportunity to reset aid delivery in Afghanistan, which for […]

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Guest Blog: No Frontpage News? Afghanistan’s Ongoing IDP Crisis

Susanne Schmeidl • Dan Tyler •

A powerful article published in the New York Times on 3 February 2011 has raised the critical question about what, if anything, humanitarian agencies are doing to address the growing IDP crisis in Afghanistan and how many children (and adults) have to die until the international community is willing to wake up and admit that […]

Migration Read more

Roads to Nowhere: Program to Win Over Afghans Fails

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Wall Street Journal, 10 February 2012 Dion Nissenbaum reports on the USAID, IRD-implemented campaign to build 1200 miles of road in insurgency-affected areas. A long list of the many things that can go wrong when you start using ‘aid as a weapons system’, including immense wastage, silly projects (think ‘flower literacy’), violence, local conflict, abandoned […]

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Was $73 bn of Afghan aid wasted?

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Politico, 12 January 2012 A former US auditor throws a telling light on US aid (in-)effectiveness, pointing out that USAID ‘has struggled’ to keep NGOs (probably those famous for-profit NGOs) overhead costs ‘under 70 per cent’ and that ‘NGO’s raw accounting data is unaudited and unverified’. He also estimates that up to 15 per cent […]

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UN: Afghan Refugee Strategy a ‘Big Mistake’

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AFP, 28 December 2011 Peter Nicolaus, head of the UN refugee programme in Afghanistan on Tuesday described its strategy in the war-wracked country since 2002 as the ‘biggest mistake UNHCR ever made’. He said the international community had failed to help returnees find a means of earning a living and therefore reintegrating into society and […]

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At Kabul airport, exodus of U.S. aid goes on

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Washington Post, 20 July 2011 ‘More than a year after The Washington Post first disclosed American concerns about the airport, a report released Wednesday by the U.S. special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction concludes that attempts to choke off the exodus of cash have been plagued by a hard-to-fathom set of obstacles.The installation of currency-counting […]

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