Scientific Underpinnings of - START - National Consortium for the ...

1.3 National Programs in Afghanistan
The first step was to forge a consensus between Afghan citizens, the Afghan government, and
their international partners, that the overarching goal in Afghanistan was to create a legitimate
and effective state capable of delivering services to the people and fulfilling its international
obligations. This consensus was built around a vision, articulated by the government, and refined
in a National Development Framework (NDF). This framework included three pillars:
(1) Human Capital and Social Protection, (2) Physical Infrastructure, and (3) Trade and
Investment, Public Administration and Rule of Law/Security, and articulated a series of crosscutting
issues, such as gender equity, security and rule of law, and administrative and financial
reform. These three pillars were then addressed through a series of twelve National Programs.
The NDF underpinned the National Development Budget, which costed the programs. The vision
and strategy laid out during the course of 2002 was subsequently framed within a comprehensive
document, Securing Afghanistan’s Future, presented to an assembled group of 62 finance and
foreign ministers from around the world on 31 st March and April 1 st 2004 in Berlin.
National Programs were designed to overcome the fragmentation and confusion of the project
model. They serve as implementation mechanisms to enable a government to perform state
functions throughout its territory in an effective and transparent manner. This is accomplished by
mobilizing actors (including government, private sector and/or civil society) to perform critical
tasks, translating the vision and mission for each state function into credible outcomes. By
providing a unified set of rules, clear decision rights and obligations were established, generating
accountability. The design of the programs was intended to harness Afghan assets and to recast
international assistance as catalytic to the state-building process. The end result of these
programs was an integrated architecture for facilitating good governance and development at
various levels of government.
National Programs seek to avoid recognized problems with traditional approaches to
development assistance by harnessing national policy oversight to national capacity and
combining it with extensive outreach and consultation to ensure transparent, effective,
accountable aid delivery. The Afghan economic team, in partnership with a group of creative
international actors, focused relentlessly on implementation of these programs during 2001–
2004. National Programs in Afghanistan included those discussed below.
National Solidarity Program (NSP)
The first program to be designed by the Government, in partnership with the World Bank and
UN Habitat, the NSP was designed to empower communities to manage the reconstruction
process. 4 The government provided block grants of approximately $20,000 to every village in the
country against the requirement that each village elect a leadership council by secret ballot, hold
participatory meetings to design recovery plans and projects, and post account documents in a
public place. While the national government set the rules and managed financing, NGOs were
contracted to manage the personnel and organizational issues, and an international firm was hired
to provide management and oversight services. Thus the government provided a legal framework
to empower a range of actors, including communities, while harnessing the considerable positive
assets of international agencies, firms, and NGOs in a concerted, coherent fashion. Four years
on, the program has seen more than 12,000 village development councils elected and more than
19,000 project plans approved.
17