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Afghan Paper Questions Effectiveness of Foreign Aid Agencies-Global Policy Forum- NGOs Afghan Paper Questions Effectiveness
BBC
of Foreign Aid Agencies
August 19, 2002
The Afghan newspaper Anis has said the government needs to regulate the activities of foreign non -government organizations. Anis said the organizations do not have the same priorities as the government and spend too much on unnecessary luxuries. Unless they are controlled the end result of their work will be zero, the paper said. The following is the text of the commentary, published on 30 July:
Foreign NGOs non-government organizations started functioning along with other reputed international organization to help Afghans right after the Soviet aggression. Their activities were quite useful and positive to support the Afghan emigrants in different areas. But with the passage of time and changes in Afghanistan several national and foreign NGOs shifted to Afghanistan and started their activities in different sectors and different parts of the country. This movement even accelerated after the establishment of the interim administration of Afghanistan.
Afghanistan lost everything it had due to 23 years of wars and aggression by the foreign powers. Consequently, most of the state infrastructures were either jammed or destroyed completely. Therefore, the people of Afghanistan expected international community in general and the great industrial states in particular to help Afghanistan stand on its feet and revive its infrastructure, thus being able to attract manpower to reconstruct and develop Afghanistan. But this did not happen. Apparently, the bad economic conditions are getting worse day after day and no considerable change has taken place in economic sector. The question is that how effective have these foreign NGOs been in the reconstruction of Afghanistan? And is the capital being spent through the NGOs utilized in suitable areas of life?
When the foreign NGOs started their activities, their presence was indeed a sore need of the time for they were the only channels to transfer aid to the people of Afghanistan.
However, after the holding of the Loya Jerga in June and the election of a new leadership and government, the Transitional Islamic State of Afghanistan came into being and set the reconstruction and maintenance of peace as its utmost duties. Hence, these two steps should be taken into account at first.
The Transitional Islamic State of Afghanistan has national and international legitimacy. Therefore the promised money for reconstruction should have been given to this administration in order to utilize it for the reconstruction of the country. However, on the contrary, 1bn dollars out of the 4.6bn dollars promised for Afghanistan has been decided to allocate for the NGOs this year.
In fact, most of the money given to foreigners is spent on the high salaries and luxurious lives of foreigners - their food and clothing, rents of modern houses inside the city and purchasing the latest model cars and this is not in accordance with the environmental conditions of our society. All these expanses are from the money that should be used to reconstruct Afghanistan. Only 20 per cent of the capital given to NGOs might be used in reconstruction of Afghanistan, while foreigners and the managers of NGOs use the rest of the money for their personal expanses. Obviously, foreign NGOs are more inclined to attracting females from among the available manpower. Thus the system of NGOs is in contrast with the interests of the people of Afghanistan. Consequently, the reconstruction of Afghanistan through NGOs will be no more than a dream.
If the Transitional Islamic State of Afghanistan does not decide to regulate the activities of NGOs, the country will once again face crises.
The basic solution to this problem is that the state of Afghanistan should make a sound and fixed policy of reconstruction, so that it could start the rehabilitation of the country in the light of such a positive and effective policy and not let the allocated money for Afghanistan's reconstruction be used in needless sectors, or foreign NGOs will spend all the capital belonging to Afghanistan and the end result will be zero.
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