Key issues : Cultural issues : Development, Cultural Values and Disability: The Example of Afghanistan

'Doing development' in Afghanistan

from Development, Cultural Values and Disability: The Example of Afghanistan by Peter Coleridge

Among the challenges facing development agencies attempting to undertake sustainable development in Afghanistan one could list the following:

• Afghanistan presents the classic profile of a war-torn country. The most essential requirements for sustainable development, such as stable communities, shared long-term aspirations, basic health and education services, and legitimate external trade, hardly exist. These factors are not to do with culture, but with the war. But the war has its roots in a conflict in which 'values' (whether cultural, ethnic, or religious) have played an important part.
• Donor governments are reluctant to fund long-term development programmes on the grounds that it is an emergency situation and there is no government in control of the whole country. Funding therefore has short time horizons, usually two years or less, which forces project planning into similarly short time spans.
• It is recognised that development efforts can play a role in either hastening the arrival of peace or (inadvertently) fuelling the conflict. At the same time there is a failure to understand, among both donors and programme planners, that changing perceptions in a way that could lead to peace building is a slow process, especially in a country with such traditional cultural values and ethnic divisions as Afghanistan. Programs which change their focus every two years are unlikely to have the desired impact.
• Although Afghan NGOs exist, they cannot be called grassroot in the sense normally understood. They have emerged in response to the availability of foreign funds, not as an indigenous movement for development and social justice. The open expression of opinions is not possible in all parts of Afghanistan. Afghan NGOs (as well as foreign agencies) tend to 'do projects' rather than engage in a development process based on local constituencies.
• Most importantly, many 'programmes do not know how to define the knowledge people have acquired through generations of survival in often inhospitable conditions and incorporate this information in the conceptualization and design of development initiatives'.¹

While there are fortunately some exceptions,* the general picture is of a series of top-down programmes that recognise (on paper) the importance of consulting local people but in practice generally fail to do this in a way that goes much beyond discussing shopping lists of needs.

The challenge is one of how to engage in a dialogue directed at reaching a common understanding between development workers and beneficiaries. Besides much longer time horizons than are currently used by development agencies in Afghanistan, this requires an approach to programme design, implementation, and evaluation which gives importance to process as well as product. It is a difficult process, fraught with pitfalls. For example, how does a development agency get close to local people without playing into the hands of local power politics? With whom does it engage in dialogue about social development (which is of equal concern to men and women) when communities are typically represented only by the most powerful men?

The process requires a commitment to training field workers in each programme who see themselves as social animators, not just technicians, as people who raise questions and encourage thoughtful answers rather than just deliver a service. One programme which has the potential to function like this is a CBR programme because it has cadres of field workers who are engaging on a daily basis with communities at the family and village level.

* Notably the Habitat programme in Mazar, which has fostered the creation of women's community fora. These fora can be described as grassroot in the sense that they are true community fora in which the members set the agenda for development.

Key issues : Cultural issues : Development, Cultural Values and Disability: The Example of Afghanistan

14/07/1999