Priorities
Priority 2. Strengthen Afghan institutional capacity to deliver core services and promote economic growth, enhancing the confidence of Kandaharis in their government.
Success against an insurgency requires a government to earn and hold the confidence of its citizens. Securing this confidence depends at least in part on a government’s delivery of necessary services including education, water, sanitation, electricity and health care; and its performance in creating jobs through investments in irrigation, roads and other development infrastructure.
Canadian Objective for 2011:
• By 2011, we expect that Kandahar’s provincial administration and core ministries of the Afghan government will be better able to provide basic services in key districts of Kandahar province.
We have launched two Canadian signature projects to help meet this objective. The first—and a major benchmark—is rehabilitation of the Dahla Dam and its irrigation system, generating employment and promoting agriculture. One of our 2011 targets is to have created 10,000 seasonal jobs as a result of the project. This quarter, the Government opened the process of soliciting proposals from contractors; we expect to select a contractor in the next quarter. Some 30 jobs have already been created in road and bridge construction and security.
In a second signature project, Canada has embarked on the construction, expansion or repair of 50 schools across key districts of Kandahar. At the end of this quarter, two of those schools were completed and 14 are under construction. This signature project is also supported by teacher training. The 2011 target is to have trained 3,000 teachers in the province, and we have begun to identify candidates for this program.
Progress in these signature projects, as in all development efforts in Afghanistan, is inevitably constrained by prevailing security conditions. Implementation, service delivery and data collection in key districts are sometimes prevented by insurgent violence.
