Visit the ARISE website at: http://www.ariseproject.org/

A large team of Afghan and other Americans from the Foundation for Global Community, the Afghan Center, and the Afghan-American community at large came together in the wake of September 11 and, over the ensuing months, collectively decided that its response to that tragedy would be a constructive one. The team applied for and was awarded a grant from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation to perform an assessment of reconstruction needs in Afghanistan. A seven-member delegation was selected to travel to Afghanistan in May 2002 to conduct the assessment. In pre-trip planning and research, it became apparent that vocational training would be a high-priority, high-results activity that would provide a solid, self-help basis for the on-going reconstruction of Afghanistan in the coming years. The team's mission, therefore, became focused on assessment of the needs for a vocational training center that would help women, former combatants, returning refugees, and other un- and under-employed Afghans to quickly gain employable skills to support their families while contributing to the rebuilding of Afghanistan's civil economy. The program envisioned to implement this vocational training concept was named ARISE, the Afghan Retraining Initiative for Self-Employment, and patterned after the highly successful Center for Citizen Initiatives' Russian Initiative for Self-Employment (RISE), which also received C.S. Mott Foundation funding in the past.

The objectives of the grant were met based on two fact-finding and coordination trips to the city of Kabul and its surrounding region - one in May and one in October 2002. Research design, analysis, and reporting phases preceded and followed each trip. The May and October trips to Kabul were funded by the C.S. Mott Foundation grant; all other activities were financed by other resources of the Foundation for Global Community and the Afghan Center, including private in-kind and cash donations and over 3200 hours of volunteer labor. This report summarizes the accomplishments of the Foundation for Global Community-Afghan Center team to date.

The focus of this assessment was on Kabul and the nearby towns of Istalif and Gardez, realizing, however, that the needs are as great or greater in provincial areas around the country and that future assessments will be required in those areas. Humanitarian relief is obviously a top priority in the immediate emergency situation, especially to get through the winters, and many NGOs and national and international donor agencies are addressing those needs. For that need for emergency relief to be temporary, though, longer term reconstruction and infrastructure investments are essential.

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On the human side, the Afghan government has given high priority to K-12 education for literacy, knowledge required for civil society, and preparation for higher education and development of professionals; and to vocational training to quickly give Afghans employable skills useful immediately to rebuilding the civil economy, supporting their families, and reintegrating former combatants and returning refugees. Reconstituting and upgrading the health care systems is also critical. High priority needs for non-human investments include rebuilding roads, irrigation systems, power supplies, and government administrative capacities

The Foundation for Global Community-Afghan Center team has chosen to focus its efforts on vocational training.

The delegation on the first trip, May 3-26, 2002, included five Afghan Americans — Mary Chopan Alamshahi, Nasir Durani, Farhad Latifi, Moosa Masody, and Ozeir Nassery — and two non-Afghan Americans — Nancy Glaser and Michael Abkin. The team, whose travel expenses were financed by this C.S. Mott Foundation grant, represented the Foundation for Global Community, the Afghan Center, the Center for Citizen Initiatives, and the World Business Academy. Several disciplines critical for the mission were represented on the team: two doctors (Mary and Farhad), an agriculturalist (Moosa), a social services planner (Nasir), an industrial engineer (Ozeir), a small business start-up and management consultant (Nancy), and a development planner and systems analyst (Mike).

In Afghanistan, the ARISE delegation attended dozens of meetings and site visits and talked with, interviewed, photographed, and videotaped farmers, street children, beggars, shop merchants, traffic policemen, ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) soldiers, government ministers, deputy ministers, and department heads, NGOs (nongovernmental organizations), international donor agencies, then-Chairman Hamid Karzai, and His Majesty Zahir Shah. A sampling of the Kabul visits: USAID, UNESCO, Relief International, Refugees International, FOCUS, International Relief Committee, Kabul University, International Organization for Migration, Red Crescent/Red Cross, PARSA, HIFA (a school for the hearing impaired), Aschiana (a school for street children), Habibya High School (Nasir's alma mater of 30 years ago, now heavily damaged), Rabia Balkhi School (Mary's high school alma mater, now reduced to rubble though since March 2002 working to educate 1200 students in K-12), Malalai and Rabia Balkhi Hospitals, and the Ministries of Education, Agriculture and Livestock, Labor and Social Affairs, Public Health, Women's Affairs, Information and Cultural Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Rural Development, and Reconstruction. In addition to Kabul, the team also visited sites and talked with government officials and members of the general public in Istalif and Gardez.

The timing was right. The Afghan Interim Authority had just given vocational training high priority for the reconstruction and stabilization period. The delegation left Afghanistan with a signed agreement from the Education Ministry to allow ARISE to use, rent-free for 10 years, 2 to 3 acres of the 36-acre site of the Afghan Institute of Technology (AIT). Also, the Ministry of Agriculture signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate and share resources with the ARISE vocational agriculture curriculum, and the delegation began work on similar MOUs with the Ministry of Public Health and UNESCO. From the USAID/Kabul office, ARISE received encouragement and ideas for writing a proposal for U.S. funding, and the Afghan Center established and staffed a permanent office in Kabul.

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To give a flavor of the experience, following are some miscellaneous snapshot observations and impressions from the needs assessment site visits and interviews:

•  The trip to Istalif, through the Shomali Plain, just north of Kabul, once flat and lush with wheat, barley, mulberries, vineyards, and villages; now flat, treeless, mined, and empty but for mud-wall ruins of villages and a few twisted vines; workers in the fields these days are minesweepers.
•  Istalif itself, once a village of 10,000, a fun day's outing from Kabul, with breathtaking views of the valley, curative springs, rugcrafters, jewelrymakers, and a destination restaurant and hotel; the whole village burned out and leveled by the Taliban in 1997 as a last holdout; creek diverted and irrigation systems destroyed by Taliban, thus successfully destroying the viticulture economy; a few hundred people have trickled back, living in tents while trying to rebuild.
•   The young woman, Sohila, 18 years old, one of four women to pass the Kabul University medical school entrance exam (out of 270 taking it), expert in using and maintaining computers (learned while with her family as refugees in Pakistan), working part time as a computer operator at the Ministry of Agriculture to support her aging parents and herself while going to medical school.
•   The four high school girls who traveled from the provinces to attend the Afghan Institute of Technology (vocational school) to learn auto mechanics and, as they said, help their country; the only girls among the 200 boys in the school.
•   The whole southwestern section of Kabul reduced to mud rubble 10 years ago by rocket fire from opposing warlord forces on opposing hilltops in the civil war days before the Taliban. Homes, schools, streets, everything gone or extensively damaged. Mary's alma mater, Rabia Balkhi, all gone: salvageable bricks piled neatly for eventual reuse; two classroom wings rebuilt by Taliban for religious school now used for 1200 girls (and some boys in the early grades) who have returned; too few classrooms for too many kids, who have to sit on the floor, in hallways, outside following the shade; yet students happy and excited to be in school, shouting gleefully while playing volleyball amidst the rubble. Many schools were like this.
•   Kabul markets full of just about anything, including colorful pepper powders, melons, tomatoes, onions, and other food products from spring harvests. The tourist shopping district, "Chicken Street", bustling, all shops full six months after Taliban, who had closed it down completely.
•   Despite frustration at the slow pace promised foreign aid is actually coming into the country, reconstruction is under way: new facades cover bared brick walls; new second stories emerge over one-storied remnants of multi-storied buildings; cranes pierce the sky.
•   Women are going out in the streets again but still mostly wearing burqas. Many beggars in the streets (previously unheard of in Afghanistan), mostly women and children, but getting better, even noticeably better during the delegation's three weeks there.

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Photographs of the May trip can be viewed at the following web sites:
http://www.ofoto.com/I.jsp?m=73740643403&n=1012883788
http://www.ofoto.com/I.jsp?m=16236553403&n=2012389808
http://www.ofoto.com/I.jsp?m=68743006403&n=1214175675

After its return from Afghanistan in May, the delegation and the entire Foundation for Global Community-Afghan Center Afghan Assessment Initiative team transitioned into the ARISE team for purposes of establishing the vocational training program. Based on what was learned during pre-trip research and planning and on the trip itself, ARISE plans to offer, over time, curricula in building trades, electronics repair and maintenance, health care services, vocational agriculture, small business management, and office administration. A commercial operation will be part of the ARISE center to provide on-the-job training opportunities, support small business incubation, and help the program become self-sustaining in the three to five years. After establishing the first training center in Kabul, ARISE will open similar training centers in provincial towns around the country, beginning in the second or third year.

Also, Afghanistan is blessed with a large cadre of professionals in the diaspora who left their country in the course of the Soviet invasion and subsequent civil wars. These highly skilled people, eager to help in the reconstruction effort, are returning to take up leadership positions in the government, with NGOs, and in private enterprises. ARISE is taking steps to tap into this human resource base of Afghan Americans, especially the tens of thousands residing in the San Francisco Bay Area, for initial staffing of the vocational training program in Kabul and subsequently around the country, including training local Afghans to ultimately take over those responsibilities.

The following activities were undertaken subsequent to the field trips to Kabul:

• Trip reports to the general public in Palo Alto and Fremont, presentations to various Kiwanis and Rotary Clubs, newspaper articles (Attachment A), and radio and television appearances in the San Francisco Bay Area

• Design of the ARISE program to include the following special features:
  
  • Modern lab and shop equipment and processes
    
  • Short, intensive training periods
    
  • Certificates of course completion
    
  • Afghan-American master trainers training local trainers
    
  • Holistic, family-oriented approach to career counseling
    
  • Job placement assistance, including a job bank
    
  • Commercial operations and microlending for income generation and small business start-up incubation
    
  • Self-sustaining in three to five years
    
  • Start soon and small, then grow by needs of the market
    
  • Start in Kabul, then replicate in the provinces
    
  • On-going reviews with public- and private-sector stakeholders of program design, priorities, performance
  
  
• Establishment of collaborative ties with several organizations:
  
  • Ministry of Education of Afghanistan - providing site on a 10-year, rent-free lease
    
  • Ministry of Agriculture of Afghanistan - providing access to agricultural research stations and trainees of research and extension workers
    
  • University of California-Davis, College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences - providing vocational agriculture curriculum and instructors
    
  • Society of St. Vincent de Paul - providing building trades curriculum, supplies, tools, shipping
    
  • Seton Institute - providing medical supplies, equipment, mobile clinic, shipping
    
  • Ecology Action - providing biointensive, sustainable agriculture courses and demonstrations
    
  • California State University, Sacramento - developing health care services courses

• Receipt of official recognition from the Afghan government as an NGO authorized to operate in the country

• Development of a brochure (Attachment B) and web site (www.ariseproject.org)

• Launch of a fundraising and grantwriting effort, resulting so far in grant applications submitted to USAID, the government of Germany, and the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, and grant prospects with the governments of Japan and the United Arab Emirates; so far about $4500 have been received from private individuals and the government of the City of Monte Sereno, California, but as yet no grant awards other than the initial C.S. Mott Foundation grant.

• Presentation to the city council of the City of Oakland, which then granted ARISE the use of city-controlled warehouse facilities to store donated equipment destined for shipment to Afghanistan for ARISE

• Development of courses in office administration and to upgrade the skills of nurses and midwives, and outline of courses in building trades

• Launch of a successful recruitment drive for an executive director to run the program in Kabul, who is in place effective March 1, 2003

• A trip to Washington, DC, the week of September 30 (by Nasir Durani, Kabir Seraj, and Mike Abkin) to hand-deliver the USAID proposal and to report to selected congressional offices and solicit support for the USAID proposal, resulting in five letters of support being sent to USAID from members of the House of Representatives - and a response from USAID encouraging ARISE to re-submit its proposal after Congress appropriates funds for FY03 and issues new guidelines

• A four-week trip to Kabul in October by Nasir Durani and Kabir Seraj, and a two-week trip by Jake Dudel of Society of St. Vincent de Paul, funded in part by the remaining Mott grant funds, which resulted in:
  
  • delivery of the ARISE proposal to USAID/Kabul
    
  • grant prospects with the governments of Germany, Japan, and the United Arab Emirates
    
  • grant proposals to the government of Germany and the Society of St. Vincent de Paul
    
  • renewal of commitment from the Ministry of Education to the lease of the AIT site for ARISE
    
  • receipt from an Afghan donor of the deed to a five-acre parcel in Kabul for use by ARISE
    
  • lease of ARISE office space
    
  • agreement from the Ministry of Agriculture (a) to use of a 10,000 square foot plot at the Badam Bakh agricultural research station in Kabul for the sustainable agriculture demonstration and courses (in association with Ecology Action) and (b) to send two Afghans to California for biointensive agriculture training (this activity still subject to funding)
    
  • strong support for the ARISE proposal to USAID and for vocational training in general from the Afghan government and from the U.S. ambassador in Kabul responsible for coordinating reconstruction efforts (William Taylor)

The program is underway in Kabul!

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