Afghanistan's Citizens' Charter Program: Empowering Communities for Better Services

Challenge

As a country in conflict, Afghanistan faces many challenges including insecurity, corruption, lack of capacity to deliver services, low level of trust citizens have in the government and its ability to meet their basic needs. Most of the country’s population live in rural villages and face various challenges such as lack of health services, poor quality education, minimal access to power, poor water facilities, lack of economic opportunities and others.

Approach

CCAP is the first inter-ministerial program where Ministries collaborate on a single program in both rural and urban areas. The Ministry of Finance (MoF) chairs the government’s working group on Citizens’ Charter with the ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development (MRRD) and the Independent Directorate of Local Governance (IDLG) as lead implementing agencies for the rural and urban components respectively. The working group also consists of the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Public Health, and Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock. The Citizens’ Charter contributes to the government’s long-term goals of reducing poverty and deepening the relationship between citizens and the state.

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"The concern in our residential area was the mud and dirty stagnant water in the lanes. As there is no recreational park near us, sometimes the children play games in the streets and fall ill as a result.  Thanks to Citizens' Charter helping us pave our lanes, that problem is being resolved for all the residents."

Gul Ahmad, resident of Mazar-e-Sharif city 

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The program, a successor to the successful National Solidarity Program (NSP), uses a community-driven development (CDD) approach to delivery services and increase citizen satisfaction and trust in government.

CDC members are village representatives, elected through a neighborhood-level secret ballot voting system.

The CCAP’s decentralized electoral process ensures representation of all neighborhoods, as well as greater women voter turnout (as ballot boxes are put in each neighborhood to improve access for women), and inspires the participation of poor, excluded, and young people that were not previously able to be elected.

Community-led functions and decisions, guided by CDCs, include planning, building and rehabilitating projects, monitoring progress, and ensuring the Government’s provision of services.

A key element to the current program’s success is the use of community-led social mobilization processes and participatory exercises to promote a pro-poor environment and prevent elite capture of public resources.

Results

• 13,005 new CDCs have been elected (12,155 in rural and 850 in urban areas)
• 12,787  CDCs community development plans have been prepared (11,937 in rural and 850 urban areas)
• 50% of CDC members are women
• 431,722 people gained access to electricity through electricity grid extension projects 675,296 people gained access to renewable energy
• 5,598,550 people gained access to irrigation
• 619,723 people gained access to roads and bridges
• 7,000,063 people gained access to water supply and sanitation services

Overall:

• Program has reached over 13,000 communities and 13.5 million beneficiaries, providing employment, critical services and infrastructure by implementing over 9,000 subprojects
• New approaches and participatory tools proved to be successful in engaging communities, empowering the poor and women
• 35% return on investment for infrastructure projects
• 10,763 grain banks established
• 42,621 labourers have benefitted from 1.75 million labour days, with an average of each labourer receiving 41 days
• Mobilized to respond to the COVID emergency at the community level by delivering awareness-raising activites across all CCAP communities

Bank Group Contribution

The International Development Association (IDA) has provided $227.7 million in grant financing for the CCAP and the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF) which is is a multi-donor trust fund administered by the World Bank on behalf of 34 donor partners that have contributed has contributed a grant of $444.3 million.  

Partners

The CCAP is implemented by MRRD and IDLG in close coordination with MoF. The program works closely with the ARTF donors, humanitarian organizations, UN agencies, including the World Food Programme and UNICEF.

Moving Forward

In the context of the overall World Bank's COVID-19 relief response in Afghanistan, $100 million of the Citizens' Charter program resources were redeployed in May 2020 to provide emergency household assistance in the form of food/cash in CCAP participating communities. A parallel emergency project recently – Relief Effort for Afghan Communities and Households (REACH) which is using CCAP platform and common funcitons like monitoring, management and procurement— was approved in August 2020 and  will benefit some 2.9 million households across Afghanistan.

Together, both projects are covering 90 percent of households in the country under the government’s “Dastarkhan-e-Milli” program, benefitting an estimated 4.1 million households with incomes of $2 a day or less. REACH will help to revive the nationwide CDC structure that had been invested in for almost two decades under the NSP. This will also set the stage for a fast-track expansion of CCAP as well as the forthcoming Early Targeting Action Warning for Food Security (ENETAWF “resilience” in Dari) project, which will establish a national disaster response and social protection early warning, early finance, and early action system.

CCAP is currently processing additional financing US$193 million to finance a Kuchi program, a peace pilot, and an urban expansion and scale-up in ten cities as well as cover the costs of the COVID-19 relief efforts.

Last Updated: Oct 20, 2020