Afghanistan still has Corruption!!!
I posted this originally on my Afghanistan Project Team’s site (igid.deveer.org), but have put it here, too. The background for the post is that my team and I wrote a paper that recommended increasing funding to USAID’s Alternative Development Program and Afghanistan’s National Solidarity Program initiative. The goal is to give a majority of the Afghani population viable economic alternatives to the illicit opium industry and, over the long-term, decrease corruption. Now read the rest of the post:
Despite having written our paper, a recent USAID report states that the Afghan government is still corrupt, despite years of effort in fighting corruption. Laura Freschi wrote in an Aid Watch blog post that asks some interesting questions about the USAID recommendations:
“Could USAID explain how concerted efforts are failing to defeat corruption as a whole when each individual project is successfully meeting its targets?”
“One of the six recommendations for future action in the report is to provide more resources and support for the High Office of Oversight (HOO), the anti-corruption agency which has until now has shown an “apparent unwillingness” to go after high-level corruption. The report notes that “often the officials and agencies that are supposed to be part of the solution to corruption are instead a critical part of the corruption syndrome.” How is the solution to aid money being stolen to give additional aid money to those who are stealing it?” [bold, my emphasis]
With respect to our project, both USAID and our team recommend: the coordination of donors and focusing anti-corruption efforts on issues Afghan citizens care about. We depart from the USAID report’s focus on governance issues and instead recommend increased funding for livelihood programs that reduce Afghan citizen’s dependence on the illicit opium economy. Freschi’s (bold) question still applies to our recommendation, how do we minimize the stealing from our program as we increase funding for it?
I would be interested to see discussion of corruption in the programs we recommend increasing funding for – Community Development Council program in the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development and the Alternative Development.
Sources:
- Post from Aid Watch – by Laura Freschi: “It’s going so badly, let’s do more of the same!” https://blogs.nyu.edu/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/1990
- USAID report on Corruption in Afghanistan: http://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PNADO248.pdf