Two decades of war have decimated Afghanistan’s governance system. Responding to the situation, the transitional government and UN-HABITAT designed the National Solidarity Programme (NSP) in 2002, to strengthen the network of some 30,000 self-governing community institutions.

The NSP has three objectives in empowering communities:

• Re-establishing relations between government and rural communities.
• Providing grants for the reconstruction of physical and social infrastructure.
• Empowering communities and establishing community-level governance structures.

The programme established local community institutions and developed the ability of communities to plan, manage, finance and monitor their own development projects. Communities work with the government through elected representatives to their own Community Development Councils (CDCs), with regular consultations and consensus-building among community members. UN-HABITAT is operating as the designated Facilitating Partner (FP) in 47 districts of nine provinces, with operations in 3,258 communities.

Activities:
The National Solidarity Programme has been implemented in five phases:

• Undertaking community awareness-raising and problem identification.
• Establishing Community Development Councils. Council members are voted in through secret ballot and must be aged above 20 years. Each elected member represents 28 eligible voters.
• Preparing and endorsing a Community Development Plan and setting up a Community Savings Box.
• Preparing designs for community projects and submitting proposals.
• Implementing projects including monitoring, evaluation and reflective project learning.

Results:
The main results have been:

• A total of 3,258 communities (670,380 families, 4.7 million people) have participated in the National Solidarity Programme.
• A total of 3,254 communities completed Community Development Councils (CDCs) elections by July 2008.
• Re-elections conducted in the communities where the CDCs have completed their tenure.
• Total of 8,270 project proposals prepared and submitted of which a total of 8,192 have been approved.
• USD 98 million disbursed for approved projects by the programme.
• USD 134 million allocated.
• Total of 5,439 infrastructure and human capital development projects completed under the programme to date.
• Social mobilization and engineering support provided to 2,752 projects.
• Training material on conflict transformation training prepared.
• Prepared engineering training materials for the engineers of the programme
• Training materials prepared in three languages.
• Exit strategy document prepared.
• A total of 279 mature communities have been handed over to the government and 792 communities are in the process of being handed over.