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Recent Expansion to Foster Stability
Over the past few months, the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) has nearly doubled the number of its offices throughout Afghanistan and more offices will be opened in the coming months. With more of Afghanistan’s provinces seeking greater prosperity, the UN is positioning itself in communities in a way that will maximize the UN’s contribution to local development. By increasing the number of offices and spreading them out, the UN will be there to bring other agencies and donors into the provinces to support the local governors and help coordinate the efforts of other aid agencies to ensure that development is efficiently planned. UNAMA helps coordinate the UN’s humanitarian and reconstruction assistance, as well as its work to improve the democratic institutions of the Afghan government.
UNAMA also promotes human rights, fosters political reconciliation, and coordinates international and civilian aid in the country.
Helping Transition to Representative Government
Between 2001 and 2005, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) provided a platform for adopting provisional arrangements in Afghanistan and laying the framework for a transition to a representative national government. In December 2005, these efforts culminated in the first meeting of a democratically elected parliament in Afghanistan in over 20 years. This past year alone, The UN provided technical and logistical guidance to the Afghan Independent Election Commission as it prepared for the first Afghan-led presidential and provincial council elections since the 1970s, registering over 4.5 million new voters (38 percent of whom were women) and putting more women on the ballot for provincial council elections than ever before. The UN and its agencies supported the Afghan government during this transition by:
- Traveling to the provinces and some of the most remote settlements to increase awareness of the upcoming election;
- Providing transportation, preparing election sites, and creating communications facilities;
- Assisting in the creation of a Joint Electoral Management Body;
- Organizing national and regional workshops on women’s political participation prior to the Parliamentary elections;
- Training election observers;
- Registering 10.5 million voters, 41 percent of whom were women;
- Assembling electoral experts to investigate election complaints;
- Assisting in reforms of the judicial system; and
- Improving the quality of legal education and law curricula throughout the country.
Relief and Reconstruction
The UN and its agencies have also undertaken countless humanitarian and reconstruction projects including:
- Assisting the return, registration, and repatriation of over 4.7 million refugees;
- Supporting rural and urban infrastructure projects by providing training and short-term job opportunities to the local populations to rebuild clinics, schools, government buildings, roads, and mobile and internet capabilities in hundreds of villages;
- Providing food, sustainability, and infrastructure for over 9 million people;
- Distributing thousands of tons of seed and fertilizer to half a million people in all provinces of Afghanistan, as well as thousands of tons of animal feed and millions of doses of animal vaccine;
- Providing large-scale drought and earthquake relief;
- Conducting an extensive locust control campaign in the northern and northwestern provinces;
- Launching a literacy project that reaches 160,000 Afghans, the majority of whom are women;
- Fostering the growth of local businesses;
- Virtually eliminating polio and measles by vaccinating millions of children a year;
- Providing 5.7 million children with vitamin A supplements;
- Distributing basic health kits to over 7 million people;
- Assisted the Ministry of Health in vaccinating over 3 million women and children against maternal and neonatal tetanus;
- Provided supplementary feeding to 300,000 children and pregnant mothers;
- Developing new curricula and textbooks for schools, as well as training 29,000 teachers; and
- Building almost 200 schools and providing them with clean water sources.
Human Rights
The UN and its agencies also support the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission. UN Human Rights Officers are currently investigating complaints of human rights abuses in Kabul and in regional offices in Bamiyan, Gardez, Herat, Jalalabad, Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif and Kunduz. The UN has also investigated cases of abuses against ethnic groups, NGOs, civil society organizations, and political activists. This past year, the UN has actively monitored human rights, particularly those newly won by Afghan women, by sponsoring awareness campaigns on gender-based violence against women and girls and recommending legislation that criminalizes rape.
Security Sector
The UN and its agencies have created and administered the Law and Order Trust Fund for Afghanistan, which finances police salaries, procures non-lethal equipment, rehabilitates police facilities, trains police officers, and assists with institutional development. They have assisted the government of Afghanistan in disarming former combatants and the containment of heavy weapons and are clearing mines in several regions of Afghanistan. Specifically, the UN has cleared 80,000 landmines and 2.5 million explosive remnants of war during the past 12 months, as well as educating 750,000 people on the risks of mines, reducing the number killed by these devices to less than 50 per month, the lowest level in over 10 years.
Gender Equality
The UN and its agencies have helped the Department of Women’s Affairs improve their capacity to respond to the needs of girls and women by providing transportation to regional offices and skills training. The UN has also focused on education for girls and women in Afghanistan.
Raising International Funds for Development
The UN has held three international donor conferences for Afghanistan. The most recent, held in London at the end of January 2006, resulted in “The Afghanistan Compact,’’ an international agreement to improve the nation’s security, adherence to the rule of law, human rights, and economic and social development. The previous conferences, in Tokyo in 2002 and in Berlin in 2004, raised over $13 billion in aid for Afghan relief and reconstruction.
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