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

Exams … DONE!

Well, I finished my exams last week on Thursday.  Classes in general are DONE!  I turned in my last paper late Monday night.  To celebrate on Tuesday, I worked on El Pueblo’s website.  Yeah!

Actually, I didn’t turn in the paper.  Beth, a group member on the Afghanistan Project, submitted the final document to the Professors.  You want to read the paper?  Well, it lives on the Afghanistan site I set up for class.  You can read the final paper here.

We scrambled to finish and compile the Afghanistan paper over the weekend – it pretty much consumed Friday morning through Monday night – but I’m very happy with the final product.  I think we have a well thought out set of ideas based on a broad survey of historical and current readings.  Because Afghanistan policy and activity unfolded while we did our research, we were able to capture sources from about a week ago.  One article about opium addiction published on May 6, 2009, formed the basis for our concluding thoughts and remarks.

Now, I just wait for the grades to roll in.  The Financial Management exam was tough but fair.  I know I made careless and not so careless errors, but I was happy my balance sheet, activities statement, and cash flow statement all balanced the way they ought to.  Even if the answers were wrong, they were at least consistent! 

I thought the microeconomics exam was tougher than previous practice exams and was tougher than I was expecting.  I struggled through a couple problems, but I think I arrived a solid solutions and conclusions for each.

All grades will be posted by the 18th.  More news on academics then.