Billions of dollars in aid poured into Afghanistan for decades, but it failed to build capacity in the country, according to Hosna Jalil, Afghanistan’s former deputy minister for interior affairs.
“Initially, I think Afghanistan, the institutions, because it has been so new, so there was no capacity even in terms of services. But later when we had the capacity in the government institutions partially … most of the implementing partners of the development agencies who put money in Afghanistan, they happened to create parallel structures or mini ministries inside ministries,” Jalil said Tuesday at the 2022 Devex World event in Washington, D.C.
Organizations implementing development projects created their own project management and implementation units, she said. Meanwhile, Afghan ministries were mostly considered as a “beneficiary and less of a partner.”
Hosna Jalil: Witness to the rise and fall of Afghan women
Hosna Jalil was the first woman to reach a ministerial position in Afghanistan's Ministry of Interior Affairs, but is now living in exile. She credits education for her rise — and says it must be kept alive to secure Afghanistan's future.
Some of these were evident in the health sector. In August 2021, the same month the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan, a report by the United States Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction found that U.S. officials sometimes design programs “without regard to the Afghan government’s ability to sustain them.” Plans for reconstruction of a hospital in Paktia Province were only shared to the Afghan Ministry of Public Health a year after construction began.
She added that those who are supposed to advise the government also engaged in implementing projects, when that could’ve been done by the ministries themselves.
“I think that's how capacity is built,” she said.
But for aid organizations that want to continue working in Afghanistan under the current Taliban government, Jalil recommended engaging “local platforms” such as community development councils, which include young people and women. That will help ensure children and women benefit from aid funds.
“Because normally even when it comes to the humanitarian crisis response … women and children and minorities are the victims of not having equal access to those funds. But having enough women engaged in those platforms, I think that's something that can at least ensure that women will get something out of it,” she said.
They can also help ensure there’s a space for Afghans, particularly the post-9/11 generation, to express themselves and to bridge the gap in schooling for girls through the provision of digitalized educational content, she said. The Taliban ordered the closure of secondary schools for girls in March.
Jalil also asked them to provide a platform that would allow Afghans “from all walks of life, including the technocrats and bureaucrats, the younger generation, the teenagers, all the way to the warlords who destroyed Afghanistan for the last couple of years, to engage in conversations.”
“We have been engaged in an ongoing war and we could never have the chance to talk to each other. All the different factions in Afghanistan. And we had deep conflicts with each other that could be handled or solved with conversations. But I think that is something that if we invest now we can get the result in a couple of years,” she said.
About the author
Jenny Lei Ravelo@JennyLeiRavelo
Jenny Lei Ravelo is a Devex Senior Reporter based in Manila. She covers global health, with a particular focus on the World Health Organization, and other development and humanitarian aid trends in Asia Pacific. Prior to Devex, she wrote for ABS-CBN, one of the largest broadcasting networks in the Philippines, and was a copy editor for various international scientific journals. She received her journalism degree from the University of Santo Tomas.
