JobsforAfghans and Pictures from our Kabul Visit

Myself and Ralph at a press conference in Kabul

A little more about the JobsforAfghans initiative and some pictures from our visit. In brief, our initiative is in response to the multiple reports - especially those from Oxfam's Matt Waldman and ACBAR (Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief) - that state multiple reasons for foreign aid not reaching its potentials in the context of Afghanistan. Few of those points are listed below:

• Per capita amounts of aid in Afghanistan is about $60 per Afghan, while the Marshall plan allocated about 10 times as much per European in late 40s.
• Yet, aid accounts for nearly 90% of public expenditure. Government revenues is on the rise, but far from levels required for a country to stand on its own feet.
• Apprximately $20billion has been spent in Afghanistan in reconstruction aid since the fall of Taliban in late 2001.
• US military expenditure (at about $34billion per year) is more than 10 times non-military expenditure in Afghanistan. ==> An obvious implication is that reallocating 10% of military expenditure to humanitarian assistance will more than double the aid dollars in the country!
• Around 40-50% of aid dollars make their way back out of Afghanistan to donor countries in the form of high consultant salaries and corporate profits.
• Alot of reconstruction work, especially large-scale projects like building highways or constructing schools, etc., are contracted out to for profit firms, often hiring either foreign labor or using capital equipment and machinery istead of hiring local labor. Many other projects are similarly sub-contracted multiple times, each layer taking profits and often high admin costs.
• Consultants receive as high as $500,000 a year in Afghanistan. I wonder how they can justify these amounts in a country where about 40% of the people will kill for a $4/day job, which is what daily wage earners get (if they are lucky enough to find work). In place of one such consultant, we could feed 500 families by giving one member 250 workdays of paid job in a year. I bet this would much more effective at "winning hearts and minds" than what a consultant can bring to a country that s/he may know very little about!

So in brief, we are proposing mega scale, labor intensive projects that would curb the 40% unemployment rate as top priority. Cash-for-work type of projects is one way to achieve this goal. As far as implementation is concerned, we propose that all the points above must be avoided i.e. multiple layers of contracting must be eliminated, hiring expensive consultants should be minimized, money should makes it way directly to the poor as much as possible, minimizing admn costs to the extent possible, etc. Anyway, for more details you cangoogle jobsforafghans or visit our webiste http://www.jobsforafghans.org/



Here are a few more pictures from our visit:

This is Ralph arriving at Kabul airport - all happy!

There are several spots like this in Kabul where unemployed men wait as early as 3am hoping to find a day's job for about Rs.200 a day ($4/day).

This is an example of the kind of projects we are proposing. This is a $25m cash for work project, funded by USAID, implemented by CARE International, 80% of project cost is daily wages for these men and women fixing drainage system and graveling roads.