Yesterday, Maximum Exposure Productions attended a high profile conference on Afghan Perspecitves on Development and Security. This was an opportunity for NGOs, charities and civil society representatives to send a message to the London Conference held tomorrow. The message was clear: radical change is needed in how aid is delivered.

Firstly, it has to be Afghan led and implemented – as David Loyn stated, summing up Ambassador Lakhdar Brahimi’s address, “…[there is] capacity and talent enough if we have the bother to look for it”. There was a deep sense that to date aid has been delivered in the wrong way. That in the future aid has to be delivered by the need of the Afghan people in terms of humanitarian need and potential and opportunity for sustainable change – it cannot be driven just by strategic political and military objectives.

Secondly, poverty in Afghanistan is not being sufficiently dealt with. As the second poorest country in the world the situation is grave. However, representatives had hope. Dr Sarah Parkinson, from the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, stated that insecurity was the main driver for poverty in Afghanistan. To deal with this, we have to look at the sources for this insecurity, not in the rhetoric of the international community, but the situation on the ground.

Thirdly, aid has to be invested in long term projects in order to foster stability and truly stimulate the Afghan economic system.

These three elements must be achieved whilst respecting women’s rights in Afghanistan, and no negotations should be agreed with the Taliban if they cannot respect the rights of women.

However there were reports of progress in terms of health (the country now has 11,000 clinics) and education (7 million students are at school, whilst 60,000 are at university).

In addition we have to learn from mistakes. Justice must not be sacrificed for peace - as Shinkai Karokhail, a member of the Afghan Parliament since 2006 remarked, “…[there can be] no peace without justice”. Corruption that permeates across the board in Afghanistan has to be stopped – accountability and transparency must be the order of the day.

With the security situation in Afghanistan worsening, we hope tomorrow’s conference will listen to what aid agencies have to say.

- Megan

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 at 12:19 pm and is filed under World Tea. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.