Building resilience: How community organizations are transforming lives in Afghanistan

In late December, we visited communities participating in the Community Resilience and Livelihoods Project (CRLP) in Kabul and Parwan province in Afghanistan. The project provides short-term livelihood opportunities and delivers urgent essential services to communities in rural and urban areas, with a strong focus on the inclusion of women, and poor and vulnerable households.

The project is funded by the World Bank and the Afghanistan Resilience Trust Fund (ARTF) and implemented by the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS).

Since its inception in mid-2022, more than 6.5 million Afghans have received short-term livelihoods support—including 60,000 women directly employed on cash-for-work projects; 10.3 million Afghans have gained access to basic services; 125,000 vulnerable female-headed households have received social grants; more than 28,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) and returnees have received short-term jobs and social grants; and 4,000 small- and medium-size Afghan enterprises have been supported through CRLP activities.   

Afghanistan’s community organizations drive development

The CRLP has been able to achieve these results at scale and in a challenging context by working through a nationwide platform of community-based organizations. These organizations, previously called Community Development Councils (CDCs), are rooted in Afghanistan’s traditions of community consultation and volunteerism.

Reaching the most vulnerable . . .

They are able to reach women, the poor, and vulnerable using a “community targeting” approach. This approach empowers communities to define criteria for poverty and vulnerability and apply them when allocating cash and in-kind grants, cash-for-work opportunities, and livelihoods support.  

The CDCs were supported over the past two decades by the Bank, ARTF donors, development partners, and non-governmental organizations to play a central role in local development decision-making and service delivery. They proved to be highly resilient in the face of shocks and crises, recurrent forced displacement, and political regime change. For example, in 2020-2021, the CDCs helped to reach more than 10 million people during the COVID-19 response, including 92 percent of IDP households in targeted areas.

After the Interim Taliban Administration dissolved CDCs as formal community organizations in 2024, the CRLP continued its work through informal community representative groups with similar membership and capacities and performing the same functions.

. . . while maintaining social cohesion in an FCV context . . .

Community leaders in Kabul told us about the challenges they face in maintaining social cohesion when a recent influx of large numbers of IDPs and returnees in their neighborhoods, increasing demand for cash-for-work opportunities well beyond the resources available. Community representative groups have been successfully managing these challenges and maintaining social cohesion by allocating resources in line with community perceptions of poverty and vulnerability, communicating clear and transparent selection criteria, and responding to community grievances.

In June 2024, the TPMA interviewed more than 7,000 people in 256 communities across 12 provinces and found that 91 percent and 92 percent of respondents respectively reported the use of clear and predefined eligibility criteria for selecting cash-for-work laborers and social grant recipients. In addition, 98 percent of respondents expressed satisfaction with the cash-for-work and social grant activities, and 84 percent of respondents reported that registered grievances had been resolved to their satisfaction.

These findings resonate strongly with those of a recent study by  Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee and co-authors about a program in Indonesia that used community targeting to allocate COVID-19 response transfers to over 8 million households. The study found that the targeting was strongly progressive, led to high satisfaction levels in communities, and that the locally identified criteria were successful in reaching widows, those suffering from recent illnesses, and those experiencing spikes in food expenditures. These groups are difficult to capture through proxy means tests or other survey-based targeting methods.  

. . . and enabling delivery by and for women in a highly constrained context.

Community organizations also play a key role in negotiating with local authorities to secure women’s access in communities across the country. We experienced such efforts directly as community leaders in one of the Kabul neighborhoods began our discussion by stressing the importance or providing livelihoods opportunities for women and facilitated a discussion between us and several women working on the road rehabilitation project nearby. 

Community leaders working with UNOPS female engineers and female social organizers employed by civil works contractors have been able to secure women’s access and safety on-site. As a result, women make up 11 percent of the CRLP labor force in urban areas. To reach women in rural areas who face mobility constraints, representatives of community organizations negotiate access for NGO facilitating partner female social organizer who travel with maharam (male relatives) and meet with female community representative group members in small group settings. CRLP NGO facilitating partner female staff are working directly with women in communities in 96 percent of project districts.  

Community investments stimulate local private sector and support climate adaptation  

Another key feature of the CRLP’s community-driven approach is that the productive assets the communities prioritize stimulate local economic and private sector activities. At the same time, they support local climate change adaptation efforts. Not only do the poor and vulnerable community members participating in the CRLP benefit in the form of cash-for-work wages and social grant resources that they use to meet basic needs, the community at-large also benefits from productive assets like improved roads, which reduce the time it takes to get agricultural products to market or for people to reach local schools and clinics; rehabilitated irrigation canals that improve on-farm productivity; and small-scale check dams that improve local water resource management. 

A further benefit—similar to what the scholar Karthik Muralidharan shows through studies of India’s Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee program—is that cash-for-work and social grant resources boost demand for goods and services offered by local businesses. Monitoring data from the CRLP shows that over 4,000 local private sector contractors and vendors have benefited from community investments in productive assets. Such multiplier effects are key in a context in which resources for both public and private sector investments in rural and urban economies are limited.

Preserving and strengthening community organizations is critical in FCV contexts

By working with community organizations, development programs like the CRLP help preserve and strengthen non-governmental institutional capacity for service delivery. This addresses a major challenge the Bank, UN, and development partners face in “politically estranged” contexts where resources and programs are delivered outside of the de facto authorities, and thus do not build the capacity of state institutions.

CRLP national and international NGO facilitating partners support community organizations to produce and update public resource maps that identify climate vulnerabilities and solutions, as well as community profiles to incorporate recently arrived IDP and returnee households, and to initiate and expand self-help initiatives such as grain banks and kitchen gardens. 

Community leader from Shinwari district, Parwan province, presents a community public resource map (Author’s photo)

Afghanistan’s community organizations are a vital resource the Bank and other development partners can support, leverage and build upon to ensure that our support for the people of Afghanistan—premised on the “principled approach” of development by women for women—truly benefits the most vulnerable Afghans. 

Disclaimer: Due to sensitivities this blog does not feature photos of women participating in the project.