Empowering citizens Engaging governments Rebuilding communities

CSP helped create a sense of normalcy
among those who participated and
across the population at large
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Box 6
CSP: Results
Successes and setbacks
CSP had two overarching goals: increasing employment and mitigating conflict. CSP directly benefited Iraqi communities
in areas most “at risk” by creating jobs, helping families generate income, rebuilding infrastructure, and
implementing youth programs. The program helped create a sense of normalcy among those who participated and
across the population at large. At its conclusion, CSP had:
• Generated more than 525,000 short-term jobs—120 percent of program targets. CSP exceeded its targets for
short-term person-months of employment each year of operation.
• Created or restored more than 57,100 long-term jobs—134 percent of program targets.
• Completed more than 1,600 total projects that rebuilt, refurbished, or revitalized key pieces of community
infrastructure.
• Created or expanded more than 10,000 businesses through micro, small, and medium enterprise grants and other
program interventions.
• Provided business development and skills training to more than 15,000 entrepreneurs.
• Graduated 41,443 citizens from vocational training programs developed in collaboration with the Ministry of Labor
and Social Affairs and covering a wide variety of marketable skills, including carpentry, construction, sewing, and
electrical repair. The graduated number of trainees represented 112 percent of program targets.
• Placed more than 9,900 vocational skills trainees in apprenticeships, where they continued to gain valuable job
training. Almost 20 percent of the apprentice placements went to women.
• Engaged more than 350,000 at-risk Iraqis ages 17–35 in more than 500 youth participation activities, including
team sports competition and arts training. The number of Iraqi youth taking part in CSP-sponsored events
exceeded targets by 43 percent.
business grants and skills training and jobs created
in direct support of the COIN strategy. With CSP, each
served completely different purposes. Long-term
employment primarily supported the business community
and the more skilled type of laborer who was
unemployed as a direct result of the war—like a shop
owner whose business was destroyed and employees
put out of work. Getting these Iraqis back to work supported
medium- and long-range COIN objectives.
Short-term employment, by contrast, proved effective
in supporting the immediate COIN objectives
crucial to the clear-hold-build strategy. This type of
employment targeted unskilled or semiskilled laborers
who would otherwise be open to recruitment into
the insurgency. It also injected much-needed capital
back into war-torn communities and helped rebuild a
sense of community. “If your city has been shot up,
and somebody is at least sweeping up the rubble
in the marketplace, it doesn’t guarantee that life is
going to be rosy, but it gives you some fragment of
hope in a situation that’s otherwise pretty hopeless,”
said James Kunder, an IRD advisor and former acting
administrator of USAID. A cash-for-work jobs program,
which was the central tenet of the CIES component,
“doesn’t eliminate the placement of IEDs and things
like that,” Kunder said, “but it gives people something
productive to do other than plant IEDs, and it also
gives some sense of hope for the future.”
“A rapid, highly visible, and tangible impact”
The CIES program component was divided into two
general project areas—infrastructure rehabilitation
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