Empowering citizens Engaging governments Rebuilding communities

Dr. Noor Abdul Aziz Baqir’s grant covered
$3,800 worth of equipment, and it
allowed her to quickly begin rebuilding
her clinic, which was an important
show of faith for her 19 workers
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Successes and setbacks
felt that the whole world was destroyed, my dreams
and my life were destroyed,” said Dr. Noor Abdul Aziz
Baqir, a dentist whose clinic had been at the market
since 1983. “As I went to see my clinic, I felt, ‘This
is the end of my career as a dentist.’ I couldn’t afford
to reopen it.” Baqir’s grant covered $3,800 worth of
equipment, and it allowed her to quickly begin rebuilding,
which was an important show of faith for her 19
workers.
Reopening destroyed commercial districts like Sadriya
often got high priority because of their visibility and
importance to the community, but fast turnarounds
like the quick grant Baqir received were not common.
Given the intensive monitoring of the grant development
and implementation process, a gap between the
conception and execution of a grant was common. The
minimum length was two months, but six months was
the average. Still, the final evaluation of the program,
conducted by International Business & Technical
Consultants, Inc. (IBTCI), noted the important role that
development grants played in the COIN effort to quickly
normalize communities struck by sudden violence.
kind of normalcy necessary to stabilize a community.
“The small grants program worked very well because
that got the businesses owners back,” Gartner said.
“They wanted their shops back but they didn’t have any
money to pay for all that damage, and besides, would
you invest in reopening your shop? There’s a war going
on. So here we are, encouraging them to come out and
just provide us proof that they own it and will work at it.”
When her dental clinic was destroyed, Baqir said she
felt just like that. She wasn’t sure how she would
continue to support her immediate and extended
family, much less rebuild her destroyed business. But
just one day after the bombing, when the two IRD staff
approached her as she sifted through the rubble, she
said her outlook changed, just that quickly. “I felt like
there was a light at the end of the tunnel,” she said,
not long after her clinic reopened—“in spite of the
misery and sadness.”
Vocational training: “A sustainable program
when we left”
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By the end of the program, the business development
component had generated 74 percent of the 57,109
long-term jobs documented by CSP. Even with the
lengthy startup time between application and award,
the grants program actually produced most jobs fairly
quickly. Approximately 25,000 jobs were created in
the first two years. Trade and service sector grants
were found to be the most efficient at enabling this
duality—quick-impact yet longer term employment
opportunities, which proved to be extremely supportive
of the COIN strategy.
While they offered fewer macro links with the rest of the
economy than did small-scale manufacturing or agribusiness
grants, and though administering and monitoring
them occasionally proved problematic, these grants
resonated profoundly with Iraqis, offering a path to the
In January 2009, IRD and USAID officers officially
handed over administration of Iraq’s rebuilt vocational
training program to the government’s Ministry of
Labor and Social Affairs (MOLSA). The event coincided
with the graduation ceremony for trainees in CSPsponsored
courses at the Waziriya training facility in
Baghdad. Ministry officials lauded IRD for rehabilitating
the facility and restarting training programs. The
handover was significant because it completed the
swift rebirth of Iraq’s ability to create a sustainable
workforce at the community level. In 2006, one year
before CSP’s direct support, the ministry graduated
7,000 vocational trainees. In 2007, after one year
with CSP’s support, the number of graduates soared
past 20,000. “We had to work through the ministry to
achieve our targets, but we basically built their capacity
to provide continuing training,” said Iqbal al-Juboori,