Local Governance in Afghanistan: A View from the Ground

Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit
2011
Both state and non-state institutions have responded to this situation by facilitating and conducting
trainings for civil servants and elected representatives. Trainings in management skills, IT and English
have been provided to civil servants by ministries in association with a range of agencies and NGOs.
Provincial council members have been trained in good governance, liaison, administration and planning
skills under the Afghanistan Subnational Governance Program and the USAID-funded Afghanistan
Local Governance Assistance Project. The National Democratic Institute has also provided training to
provincial councillors to help develop their capacity to participate in provincial development planning
exercises, respond to their constituencies, and oversee activities of the provincial administration.
However, a sizeable number of provincial council members are unable to read and write to adequate
standards, let alone deal with development terminology and a whole new realm of conceptual
complexity related to their mandate. It was observed that some had problems engaging with the
technical support provided by government, finding it hard to assimilate concepts often widely removed
from their own life experience. This is compounded by the fact that documents explaining local
government policy are largely composed by Western-trained minds with little apparent understanding
of cultural context. Difficulties of accurately translating legalistic English into Dari or Pashto present
a further challenge. There thus remains a pressing need to maintain training momentum, address
issues of language and re-evaluate training design and delivery to ensure that the way it is being
provided is in line with the needs of the trainee. As one IDLG official suggested, greater effort must
be devoted to communicating concepts in ways that can be more easily understood and applied.
The establishment of the Provincial Affairs Directorate (PAD) within IARCSC to recruit and train civil
servants in all 34 provinces is a positive step. The PAD has already identified training requirements
of civil servants in a pilot conducted in Nangarhar, Kunar and Laghman, and plans to extend training
based on its results to a further eight provinces by 2012-13. 152 This second phase will focus on
mentoring as a training method, prepare standardised training modules according to ministries and
grades of employees, and link capacity building initiatives to performance assessment.
Policy Issues: There is an identified need to make more funds available to meet the training needs of
civil servants and provincial council members. However, above all, there needs to be a coordinated
approach to training, and the different techniques used by the many organisations involved need to
be consolidated into a unified approach. The types of training on offer also need to be reassessed, and
could be more focused on providing mentoring models that deliver on a regular little-and-often basis.
Provincial training facilities run by IARCSC would benefit from further development, and conducting
training in provincial centres would help foster a stronger sense of provincial identity among districtlevel
officials. Mentoring needs to be encouraged within provincial and district offices to enable
recruits to learn from those with longer service. Capacity building initiatives could also be linked to
performance assessment mechanisms and salary upgrades. Given their relatively small numbers and
the nature of their tasks, customised training needs to be developed for provincial councillors. This
should be developed in line with their capacity, paying adequate attention to training materials,
concepts used and issues of translation.
7.12 Summary of policy options
The Centralised State
• Modify the 2010 Draft Legislation on Local Government to provide meaningful powers to
provincial and district representative bodies that give them clear authority to exercise scrutiny
and sanction the executive, and identified powers to act within the Provincial Development
Committee.
• Define in the draft legislation the autonomy of the provincial council and its freedom to report
directly to the Wolesi Jirga.
152 “An Organizational Capacity Development Needs Assessment Tool for Subnational Government,” http://www.csc.gov.
af/pad/pad-overview-program-%20ocdna.pdf (accessed 20 April 2011).
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