Progress report strengthening the national statistical system of the islamic republic of afghanistan

4. Consulting activities

During the reporting period SRF project have implemented a number of activities in different fields of project actions that highlights its state of play. Most of the indicated activities have been already agreed with the WB and CSO and although the project put a lot of efforts to accelerate the implementation process, it seems that, some of them will not be in place as it was expected and has to push them during the next reporting period as well. Over three quarters of activities made it clear that there are certain delays in the project implementation that affects the project actions and has deep impacts on the level of disbursement of funds which was already indicated above. It is important to indicate that implementation process by itself takes time in Afghanistan and SRF project is not an exclusion, which is considered as one of the main challenges of the project not only in its initial stage, but the entire project life.
4.1. First MCMC meeting.

Monitoring and Change Management Committee has been planned as one of the main body that will check the project activities and its implementation issues according to accepted plan and make sure to what extent it is leading to the capacity building. Although MCMC, which consist of 7 members, was established in May (May 17), it was not able to arrange its meeting and discuss its duties and responsibilities in June due to CSO deep involvement with a wide range of activities.

First MCMC meeting was arranged on July 27, 2011 and set up the initial acting plan for the rest of project activities. The MCMC meeting indicated that further activities of the committee will start after the twinning arrangement that will clarify the project actions and allows it to arrange all the planned activities. The information of MCMC meeting in more detail is given in the annexes (see the annex 3).
4.2. Meetings with TICA.

As it was informed in the first progress report SRF and CSO are paying deep attention to TICA that is going to invest some amount of funds for the CSO’s Statistical Training Centre to enable the organization develop its own training plans in the nearest future and establish real potential for statistical capacity building at the CSO level that can bring benefit to all the line ministries in the field of statistics as well.

At the beginning of August CSO/PICT agreed to have a meeting with the TICA Coordinator at his office and had submitted an official letter of CSO with two main issues that CSO wanted to discuss with TICA. The first issue was related to TICA input in the training of CSO staff members in different aspects of statistics with some exact topics in the field of statistics that supposed to be organized both in Turkey and Afghanistan in order to enable CSO staff members to have the possibility to observe how statistical works have been implemented in other countries and learn some modern alternatives of data collection and its analyzes.

Second issue was more complicated and involved the construction of the STC that supposed to be started by TICA office during 2011. It was very important that TICA is working on the design of training centre and offered its own suggestion and mentioned that the final decision is not been made and it will be clarified with TICA headquarter soon and TICA will inform CSO accordingly.

In two weeks time TICA approached CSO through SRF and asked to see the site where the STC is planned to be built and check the appropriateness of the site with the design of the building and clarify some important issues of modern standards that needs to be in place and met, like electricity connection, sanitation, earthquake requirements, water supply, central heating possibilities and so on.

CSO is waiting for the final decision of TICA in regard to the training courses and construction. The minutes of the meeting are attached to the report (see annex 4).

4.3. Meetings with the Kabul University.

As it was indicated in the previous report, one of the main activities that SRF was involved and focussed on to provide sustainable capacity development for CSO and line ministries (it is applicable only to those staff members that are dealing with statistics in these organizations) is to organize higher education course (BS) with Kabul University for those staff that have some economical backgrounds already.

The issue of organizing the training course for 14 years educated staff members was discussed with the Dean of Economical Department and with his suggestion it was brought to the Chancellor of the University - Mr. Hamidullah Hamin who has agreed with this idea and mentioned that KU can give CSO only one chance, it will take the students without prior testing that is the official requirement of KU due to the fees payment that CSO is agree to do through WB project. The rest of the requirements and rules of KU will be applicable for the CSO staff members and this issue needs to be addressed with the Ministry of Higher Education as an organization that is controlling and managing all the universities activities in Afghanistan.

It is important to indicate that SRF project along with the Head of the Department of Training Centre of CSO - Mr. Bawari had a number of meetings with the KU the last one of which was on September 19^th and 20^th, 2011. Every simple meeting that was arranged took over a week and brought up some new problems or issue for CSO. Finally on September 20^th it was agreed that Economical Department will look at the protocol prepared by CSO and make according changes if there is a need. By the end of discussion one thing became clear that the division of Statistics wants to clarify the fees payment and its size and agreed that it will provide CSO and the project with the official rate which KU has been using for some outside teachers that have been invited to KU ($50 per hour). Total amount of this training course is approximately close to $50000 per year for the next three years, which is not still officially submitted yet. More detail information in regard to KU meetings is given on the annexes of the report (see minutes of KU meetings in annex 5, 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3).

4.4. Training course for financial staff of CSO and MoF.

Implementation of any project for the purpose of development or capacity building requires a great deal of actions from the financial team and their readiness and preparedness for the financial part of actions, which is tremendously important in the case of Afghanistan when any type of development project is related to the Ministry of Finance. SRF project is one of these kinds of projects and its financial activities are fully dependent on the speed and interest of the CSO financial team, which supposed to present all the required documentation to MoF.

Involvement of financial team in training and even attraction of the staff members of Ministry of Finance in it was actually first actions in its kind that SRF project had implemented in its activities, which gave the project very good credits in its relationships with MoF afterwards. Initially this training course and exchange of experience was planned in July and later on it was postponed due to foreign travel policy for government personnel to August and then even to September. Finally it took place from September 5 till September 13 and 6 participants (4 from CSO and 2 from MoF) were sent to Statistical Agency and Ministry of Finance of Tajikistan.

The results of the training is given in the report attached below as an annex (see the annex 3) and PICT would like to indicate only one important issue this training came up with. The visit indicated the extreme importance of joint activities of different institution that can make the collaboration among them close enough and helps them to understand the peculiarities of each other’s institution and enable them to provide better support in both directions.

CSO and MoF of Afghanistan's staff during the meeting with Director of Statistical Agency of Tajikistan at SA office at the beginning (left) and the end (right) of trip (September 6 and 12, 2011 accordingly)
4.5. PICT activities' report at the STF meeting.

Actually prior to acceptance of SRF project CSO had agreed with all the international organizations and some of local ones that are involved in different statistical activities to meet once per quarter to discuss the statistical problems and put all the efforts to help CSO in development of data collection, processing, analyses and dissemination.

Since the establishment of SRF project and starting its implementation SRF has become one of the focal point of statistical activities and began to report its results and achievements in every STF meeting. Last STF meeting was held on July 25, where SRF has reported its state of play since the beginning of February up to the meeting date.

Basically, the information covered all the project activities that were reflected in two previous reports periods, where the main focus was on the twinning arrangement and its development as one of the main component of the SRF project that will lead to capacity building by conducting various actions from consulting activities up to training actions (study visits, learning by doing and on the job training).

4.6. User satisfaction survey

CSO by its mandate is closely related to all the productive and non productive, public and private, government and nongovernment and even international organizations that are acting in Afghanistan. In order to prepare statistical data CSO does require a number of information from all these organizations and at the same time is able to provide all of them with great deal of data produced by its personnel to help them to plan their further actions accordingly and more effectively.

As a government agency CSO gets, prepares and submits a variety of information with the Government requirements and, that is why, it is considered a government oriented organization. It is very important to make related changes in this approach and put relevant efforts to allow statistical organization to take into accounts other agencies or users needs and subsequently satisfy it.

In order to find out the data needs of all organization SRF project with the suggestion of the WB arranged to conduct the user satisfaction survey that was planned to be conducted sometime during the second quarter of 1390, unfortunately, it was delayed with the proposal of its conducting not only in Kabul, but in more wider range of provinces, if there is any kind of possibilities. PICT and the Department of Field Operation (DFO) of CSO had worked on this issue and it was clarified that most of institutions on the list from provinces are those companies that are at the moment in good relationship with the CSO regional branches and this attempt will not give good results for the organization at this stage. It was decided to arrange the survey first of all only in Kabul and check the results and based on this then CSO can plan to arrange it on the wider area or spread out the experience to the more or less secure provinces.

PICT had discussed with the DFO all the relevant and related issues and clarified the required costs and approved them with the WB. The survey was planned for September 17-21 and its seminar preparation on September 13 and 14^th. Unfortunately due to insurgents attack to US Embassy that is located very close to CSO office it was almost closed on these dates and only a few staff members were presented. Moreover, almost 3/4 of the enumerators were chosen among the women of CSO and they were not able to come to the office and the time was changed and the actual survey will be done in Meezan or last decade of September (September 25 to October 1) and the result will be reflected in the next progress report.



USS seminar for enumerators on September 18, 2011