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UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

AFGHANISTAN: First-ever human development report

KABUL, 8 April 2003 (IRIN) - After a decade of lack of reliable information, Afghanistan is taking the first steps to prepare its first-ever National Human Development Report (NHDR). Currently, very little relevant and reliable information exists for policy makers and stakeholders. "Consultation will be meaningless unless stakeholders are equipped with information," Hanif Atmar, the Afghan minister of rural rehabilitation and development, told IRIN in the capital, Kabul, on Tuesday.

The Afghan government and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) on Saturday signed a US $200,000 project agreement to produce an NHDR through the Afghan rural rehabilitation and development ministry. "The shaping of appropriate institutions and investments for social reconstruction must be grounded in analysis derived from a far stronger statistical base than is currently available," Atmar said, adding that an NHDR would assist Afghanistan back into the global development mainstream.

Since 1992, over 420 NHDRs have been produced by 130 countries, identifying many issues of importance. "The NHRDs are prepared by national teams with support from UNDP country offices," Ercan Murat, the country director of UNDP Afghanistan, told IRIN, noting that Afghanistan had not been included in the global Human Development Report since the mid-1990s.

According to Christina Bennett, a communications manager with the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU), an independent research institution, as a result of lack of information, most of the programmes in Afghanistan have been based on assumptions rather than data and analysis. "Programmes are continuing to be implemented without reliable data that as a result have either been short term or focused on a particular region or a particular problem," she told IRIN in Kabul.

AREU had identified the three main information-gathering problems as being firstly "the knowledge gap, second there has not been funding for long-term reliable data in Afghanistan and third is the capacity gap," Bennett said, pointing out that most international organisations and the UN did not have the time or the money to carry out research. She believes that even today neither the Afghan government nor academic institutions like Kabul University had the resources or the capacity to conduct researches on their own.

"There is data and analysis on Afghanistan, but collected by different organisations with different methodologies," Bennett said, noting that it was difficult to compare those reports across years and studies.

Themes: (IRIN) Other

[ENDS]

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