Empowering citizens Engaging governments Rebuilding communities

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the renovation of the Mosul Social Club for Families generated more than 1,800 days of short-term employment, and the reopened facility created at least 25 long-term jobs 3 Successes and setbacks funds made maintenance impossible and the facility fell into disrepair. As the security situation in Mosul began to stabilize, however, IRD staff believed that breathing new life into the club would be seen as a powerful symbol of Mosul’s resurgence and might help return a sense of normalcy to a divided city. So IRD embarked on an extensive CIES project that began with cleaning the club’s grounds and removing years of debris and continued with building a new children’s playground and information kiosks. Building rehabilitation required skills ranging from basic demolition and wall repair to more complex electrical engineering. Altogether, the renovation of the Mosul Social Club for Families generated more than 1,800 days of short-term employment, and the reopened facility created at least 25 long-term jobs. the fall of Hussein’s regime, the enforcement of that law ceased, and the natural cultural approach of a repressed population quickly took hold in Basra’s city streets, where thousands of goats and other small livestock began to subsist on garbage. “No matter how much effort you put into cleaning streets and installing trash receptacles, in the next five minutes all that rubbish would be on the streets,” Warmke said. “It was clear to me that if we were trying to make an impact, this was not the way to go forward. I discussed it with our provincial reconstruction team, with the military and with others on the ground, and it was clear that we didn’t see any value in taking our CSP money and doing cleanup.” 38 On the ground, adapting to what’s needed While the program’s general pattern was to start with cleanup campaigns before moving to infrastructure and rehabilitation work, not every CSP city followed the same template. In volatile, unstable environments, IRD’s city directors were responsible for balancing the realities on the ground against the CSP design. “In a city like Baghdad, it was essential to ensure that the streets were clean because of IEDs, and the whole military strategy there was to ensure that every effort was made to improve essential service delivery,” said Dar Warmke, who led the CSP expansion into Basra. “When I arrived, it was very clear that Basra was a neglected city, and had been for years, and I realized from day one that it would make no difference to launch cleanup campaigns, that it would be throwing good money into a black hole.” When CSP moved into Basra in 2007, the situation was not like Baghdad, Warmke said. “You had 1.5 million people living in what was often referred to as the ‘Sadr city of the south.’” The area’s marshes had been drained under Saddam Hussein, and the district’s rural dwellers had been forced into the city, where they were not allowed to raise animals. After In Basra, the major concentration for immediate CIES work centered on cleaning and restoring canals, which the stakeholders determined to be the most urgent need, followed by rehabilitating schools and hospitals. Although Basra didn’t follow the same template as other locations, local Iraqis were still being employed on projects that would ultimately allow further CSPsupported work. When USAID and the local PRT asked IRD to rehabilitate the Basra Children’s Hospital as the area’s first project, for example, IRD staff also began designing a vocational training program with an eye toward future hospital staffing needs. So while CIES projects were often the most readily available stabilization tool in a COIN environment, they also functioned as the structural backbone of CSP. The cleanup campaigns yielded immediate dividends, while infrastructure repairs were often completed in a few months or less. They put Iraqis to work and, in the most successful cases, helped legitimize government services. They also laid the foundation for much of the later CSP work. Without streets free of debris or parks unencumbered by trash, or without basic civil infrastructure restored to some working level, the other CSP components simply could not have proceeded.
the trash cleanup campaigns were very high profile, immediately improved life quality, and, with the rare exception of a city like Basra, represented CSP’s initial foray into a community Overcoming the “messy” realities of a COIN environment IRD faced challenges in implementing a rapid, cashfor-work component like CIES, including the issue of documentation. Laborers were generally paid in daily financial transactions, but payments were not always possible to track or fully account for, due to the frenetic pace of operating and the unwillingness of many Iraqi men to give their full names and supply contact information. Subsequently, the trash collection projects became a lightning rod for CSP critics, and IRD’s own early administrative missteps—lack of staff capacity, inadequate record keeping, miscommunication between headquarters and the field—created additional obstacles. Internally, staff dealt with the frustration of having to balance bureaucratic requirements and IRD’s own administrative limits with the demands of creating jobs. the context of a COIN operation. The work also saved lives. “The trash cleanup crews found IEDs hidden in the garbage, right there on the streets,” said Andrew Wilson. “They’d be going along, cleaning a neighborhood out, and they’d find IEDs. That wasn’t necessarily rare. Right there, you’re saving lives, people’s lives.” However, “IEDs removed” was not an indicator of program success, and items that were, such as person-months of employment, relied heavily on documentation to show progress and justify the high expenditures. At one point, CSP was disbursing up to $1 million a day, and much of that was for the CIES cash-for-work activities. Due to the sheer size of CSP, and the chaotic environment IRD was operating in, tracking each dollar and verifying the honesty of every local contractor was difficult. 3 Successes and setbacks “In Ramadi, we wrote a work plan in December 2006, but our first cash-for-work for 1,000 people wasn’t until March 1. I was on the verge of losing all credibility with the military,” said Travis Gartner, IRD’s deputy chief of party. “They took me where I wanted to go, they were trying to engage the local government, the community leaders, and they are bringing me to meetings, learning about the community. Weeks and weeks start to go by and they start asking me, ‘Hey, when are you guys going to do something?’ You know, they had their CERP fund and would go to these <strong>communities</strong> and say, ‘Who needs a job? Line ‘em up.’ And I’m working through a tendering process, and I have to vet a guy to make sure he’s not a terrorist.” For better or worse, the trash cleanup campaigns came to define CSP in many ways. They were high profile, immediately improved life quality, and, with the rare exception of a city like Basra, represented CSP’s initial foray into a community. Removing rubble, trash, and debris in the wake of insurgent control or military exercises showed how people’s most basic needs, including security, could be immediately addressed in “The cleanup campaign was effective but messy,” said Mamadou Sidibe, who joined IRD as its director of monitoring and evaluation in 2008. “Let’s say you hired 100 employees a day, for two months. If you visit a site, you’ll only see an average of those workers. Sometimes you’ll see 60, other times it could be 180. These are extremely hard to monitor.” But, Sidibe points out, cleanup activities are the kind of projects “that the military likes best because it keeps unskilled laborers busy.” CSP was designed the way it was for a reason, he said, and cash-for-work was an integral part of it, even if the ramifications weren’t completely thought through. “CSP was pouring money into cleaning campaigns to make sure people have some income rather than be hired by al Qaeda. At the same time, it opened the door to some corruption.” Even though CIES activities exceeded goals, serious concerns over the ability of cleanup campaigns to avoid fraud at the local level began to surface. In late 2007, these concerns led to an overall audit of CSP by a regional inspector general for USAID. Some USAID workers on the ground, and even some military leaders 39
Page 1: Empowering citizens Engaging govern
Page 4 and 5: Copyright © by International Relie
Page 6 and 7: In memory of Awni Quandour, whose r
Page 8 and 9: Overview General David Petraeus, co
Page 10 and 11: what made CSP stand out was the clo
Page 12 and 13: By the end of the program, the busi
Page 14 and 15: 1 Building community trust through
Page 16 and 17: “ The community believed in what
Page 18 and 19: Community action groups stood at th
Page 20 and 21: “ Many colleagues have told me th
Page 22 and 23: IRD’s health advisor referred Oma
Page 24 and 25: IRD placed a premium on diversity
Page 26 and 27: Whenever harm befell a community ac
Page 28 and 29: Scheduled to wind down in 2012 afte
Page 30 and 31: 2 A complete stabilization package
Page 32 and 33: As planning for CSP unfolded, the s
Page 34 and 35: “ There were no similar programs.
Page 36 and 37: the most successful projects were t
Page 38 and 39: “ You are the future of Ramadi. Y
Page 40 and 41: “[Colonel John Charlton] was the
Page 42 and 43: 3 Successes and setbacks in a count
Page 44 and 45: CSP helped create a sense of normal
Page 48 and 49: By combining his personal savings w
Page 50 and 51: Ninety-eight percent of grantee bus
Page 52 and 53: Dr. Noor Abdul Aziz Baqir’s grant
Page 54 and 55: all the training centers renovated
Page 56 and 57: IRD embarked on its own job placeme
Page 58 and 59: CSP’s youth activities component
Page 60: most Iraqi citizens had an overwhel
Page 63 and 64: “We had challenges, but with the
Page 65 and 66: CSP was unprecedented in scale, but
Page 67 and 68: “ Without security, there is no d
Page 69 and 70: IRD’s staffing woes could be brok
Page 71 and 72: Many key tactical lessons have alre
Page 74 and 75: Epilogue
Page 76 and 77: Acronyms ACV CAG Assistance to Civi
Page 80: This report details IRD’s impleme

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