Aid for Afghans that reaches no one

The reconstruction and rebuilding of the mind after a war does not come from brick and mortar. For money wasted on each non-combatant soldier in Afghanistan, it is possible to provide drinking water to over 50 remote village schools every year without bringing in useless foreign consultants to carry out feasibility studies. For the annual cost of every high-powered paper qualified impractical UN consultant sitting in Kabul, it is possible to have five technically and financially self-sufficient solar electrified villages every year. For every foreign consultant being paid $1,000 a day, it is possible to provide employment to 50 Afghans for a month. There are several hundred glorified clerks pushing paper and wasting thousands of dollars. What precisely are they doing for the rural poor? No one wants to know or even ask. Not surprising there is so much resentment against foreigners here.

It does not require a degree from Harvard or Cambridge to figure out the simple solutions for Afghanistan. The answer is to demystify and decentralise, right down to the community level. Afghans have built their houses with local cost materials for generations. They could teach these foreign experts a thing or two about traditional water harvesting systems and, given the opportunity and trust, could reconstruct and rebuild these systems themselves at much lower costs.

The answer is to develop the capacity and competence of the rural poor instead of depending on foreign experts clueless about rural realities. Between 2005 and 2007 the Barefoot College — which I am associated with — has been able to train 25 semi-literate rural men and women to solar electrify over 900 houses in 21 villages. In the history of Afghanistan they have never seen a semi-literate rural woman as solar engineer. Today, the best woman solar engineer is a 55-year-old semi-literate rural grandmother from the Faryab region, who has solar electrified 200 houses and looks after their repair and maintenance. Since 2005 these solar units are still providing four hours of light every night! The 21 villages are technically and financially self sufficient for over a year now.

And what is the track record of the UN and the World Bank drawing fantastic salaries and perks in the last five years? They talk and write about the emerging energy crisis and produce voluminous feasibility studies of the need to draft policies, but what do they have to show on the ground? Forget success, they do not even have one failure to show they have at least tried. Not one fully solar electrified village in Afghanistan. Not one trained person from the village who can look after the repair and maintenance of the hundreds of solar units distributed in the ‘national solidarity programme villages’, that the government has set up to help rural folk plan and manage their own development projects.

Little wonder then that Afghanistan’s future remains as bleak as ever.

The writer is founder-director of The Barefoot College, Tilonia