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Well-Paid Development Jobs the Top Choice for Many in Afghanistan, Including State Workers- NGOs - Global policy Forum Well-Paid Development Jobs the Top Choice for Many in Afghanistan,
Associated Press
Including State Workers
November 5, 2002
Asadullah Bakash knows exactly what he wants out of life. "I want to work with foreigners," says the former English literature student. "You get more experience that way and the money is better." By foreigners, Bakash means the dozens of international aid organizations that have established missions or expanded operations in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban in December.
The influx of groups to this southern Afghan city is worrying some government officials, who are having trouble keeping employees, tempted by salaries much higher than what the state can afford to pay. The trend is also alarming aid groups themselves, who fear that by hiring key workers from short-staffed and underfunded government departments, they are hindering, rather than helping, the country's development.
Bakash, 21, says he has no interest in a government job and expects to be hired by an aid agency in a few weeks. Development organizations and U.N. agencies are among the only growing employers in the formal sector of Afghanistan's battered economy. Nationwide, they employ thousands of security guards, drivers, and interpreters, as well as university graduates and those with office and language skills.
There are about 30 U.N agencies and aid groups, known as non-governmental organizations, in Kandahar, specializing in areas such as health, sanitation or education. They have set up offices in upmarket residential areas surrounded by high fences. Their employees fill the city's roads with 4-wheel drive vehicles often emblazoned with stickers or flags showing who they belong to.
Many have been in Afghanistan, which topped the world's list of suffering countries for decades, for 15 years or more. But most stopped work or scaled down operations shortly before the U.S. campaign to oust the Taliban in October. Now, with improved security conditions and government support, they are back.
In the compound of the United Nation's World Food Program, there are 12 advertised openings pinned up, calling for engineers, field workers, media officers and administrative staff. Other vacancies are pasted outside the offices of individual aid groups.
A driver for a foreign aid agency starts on a salary of more than $100 a month, a fortune in a country where teachers struggle to feed their families on half that. Administrative staff can take home six times as much or more, depending on experience. Jabar Abdul, vice deputy of the public health department, has seen four or five doctors and an equal number of nurses and midwives leave the state sector for aid agencies this year.
"The government cannot give them enough salary, so they want to receive more," he said in his office at Kandahar's main hospital. "The skilled people are going." Abdul said most of the departing staff remain in medicine and shift to regions where the aid groups are running clinics. Some doctors, however, have become interpreters, he said.
The city's education department has told the foreign aid agencies not to employ teachers seeking work with them, says its minister, Mohammad Dawood Barak. He was unable to give figures on how many of his staff had left their posts.
"We need more teachers. If they all work for the NGOs, who will teach the children?" he said.
Aid organizations in Kandahar acknowledge the government's concern. They say they always ask where a jobseeker is currently working and try not to poach them from government posts. "We are aware of the problem and try and avoid it as much as possible," said Laurent Gisel, head of the local branch of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Diderik Van Halsema, from Medicins San Frontiers, said the solution was to strengthen and improve the quality of government ministries so that employees were less likely to leave, adding that many aid groups and donor countries are already engaged in such projects.
Not all government workers are desperate to switch employers, however. At the city's engineering department, staff are putting in 18-hour days working on a development plan for the city, a joint project between the United Nations and foreign donors. Chief engineer Abdul Karim says he would not leave, despite knowing that a "night watchman at an NGO earns more than me." "I have been waiting for the day when peace would come," he said. "I love my country and I now intend to work for its development."
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