Direct grants to a village council in Jurm, Badakshan province, have reduced corruption and helped the community set up and manage their own water system and to introduce education for girls. This development model of providing small grants, often less than US$ 100,000 (€ 70,000), to Community Development Councils (CDCs), has been replicated in thousands of other villages as part of Afghanistan’s National Solidarity Programme, set up in 2003. Five years later, in the village of Fargamanch 3,270 families have taps for clean drinking water near their homes, reducing waterborne diseases.

The councils are also a check on corruption. When 200 bags of wheat mysteriously disappeared from the local government this year, council members demanded they be returned. (They were.) “The government doesn’t like us anymore, they want the old system back” laughed Mr. Muhamed Azghari, an employee of the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN), which supports 1,254 CDCs across five provinces of central and northeastern Afghanistan [1].

[1] Social audits in Afghanistan: making local governance more transparent, AKDN Development Blog, 08 Jun 2009

Related news: Afghanistan: piped water in short supply, Source South Asia, 21 Jan 2009

Related web site: Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development - National Solidarity Programme

Contact:

• National Solidarity Programme (NSP), Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development (MRRD), Afghanistan, contact page
• Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN), contact page

Source: Sabrina Tavernise and Sangar Rahimi, New York Times, 13 Nov 2009

See a video testimony for an NSP-financed water project

Tags: financing, gender, governance, participatory management, scaling up, south asia, transparency, water supply