UNAMA coordinates assistance for flood victims in Samangan
UNAMA has been coordinating relief efforts with the Afghan Red Crescent Society to provide essential non-food items to people affected by floods in the Khuram Wa Sarbagh district of Samangan province, in the north of the country. Thirty houses were destroyed by floods last week and 76 damaged. Agricultural lands supporting some 500 families were destroyed.

World Bank funds new projects for 15,000 rural families
Thirteen new projects providing communities with vocational skills-training, potable water supplies and community centres were inaugurated recently in Kushk Robat-e-Sangi district in Heart province. Embroidery and tailoring training are among the skills that people there are going to benefit from, helping them to provide incomes for their families.

Nearly 15,000 families from 13 villages are expected to benefit from the projects, which are being funded by the World Bank through the National Solidarity Programme at a cost of nearly five-million Afghani ($100,000).

Afghanistan prepares for first ICT conference
The United Nations Development Programme and the Ministry of Communications have joined efforts to organize Afghanistan's first ever Information and Communications Technology conference.

The event, which starts tomorrow, will see hundreds of participants from the growing information and communications technology industry here.

The two-day conference will provide information for high-level government officials, the private sector as well as representatives from the provinces, academics and civil society groups.

As a highlight, the project will also see the launch of top-level Internet domains and online registration for .af website addresses.

UNICEF's bird flu public information campaign gains pace
Tests continue to be conducted on bird samples at the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation laboratory in Italy. Cases of the deadly H5N1 strain of avian influenza have been detected in four provinces – Kapisa, Kabul, Logar and Nangahar.

While tests continue the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) is moving forward with the nationwide public information campaign to raise awareness about the measures that we can all take to protect ourselves and contain any possible outbreaks.

The government has identified 20 priority provinces (Kabul, Kapisa, Parwan, Wardak, Logar, Ghazni, Khost, Nangarhar, Laghman, Badakhshan, Takhar, Baghlan, Kunduz, Balkh, Jawjan, Heart, Ghor, Nimroz, Helmand and Kandahar) for immediate community-based communication activities

Of these, seven (Kabul, Kapisa, Parwan, Wardak, Logar, Nangarhar and Laghman) are considered highest risk, and these will receive a full range of interpersonal communication materials this week – including flip charts, posters, leaflets etc.

The interpersonal communication approach is considered vital to ensuring that the preventative messages on avian influenza are fully understood.

Meantime, national television and radio are continuing regular information broadcasts, and four new radio spots are now being broadcast. In addition a new television drama has been finalised and will start to be broadcast shortly.

In the coming weeks, the next phase of the communication strategy will get underway, reaching the remaining 14 provinces, involving private sector media, and looking at more vehicles for community outreach.

Today's Guest
Our guest speaker today is John Flanagan, Deputy Director of the United Nations Mine Action Service. Mr. Flanagan will speak about the progress of mine clearance activities in Afghanistan and the transition of these activities from the United Nations to the Government of Afghanistan.

John Flanagan the Deputy Director of UNMAS

I'm from the United Nations Mine Action Service (UNMAS), which in addition to supporting mine action programmes in Afghanistan, supports mine action in places like Sudan, Burundi, the Congo, Lebanon and Eritrea.

At the request of the Afghan Government, UNMAS – through the United Nations Mine Action Centre for Afghanistan, or UNMACA, with which most of you are familiar – is responsible for the day-to-day coordination of Afghanistan's Mine Action Programme.

Afghanistan's Mine Action Programme is the biggest and oldest of its type in the world and the achievements to date have been impressive. The MAPA has already cleared more than one billion square metres of land since 1990, and it's estimated that a further 716 million square metres of land remain to be cleared. So far, almost 329,000 anti-personnel mines and more than 18,000 anti-tank mines and almost seven million items of unexploded ordnance have been destroyed.

In 2005, a nationwide survey of contaminated land in Afghanistan was completed and this data is being continuously updated. The survey has pinpointed 2,370 communities affected by suspected hazardous areas.

Of these communities, to date, 160 are considered high-impacted, 493 are medium and the remainder are low or no impact due to markings that clearly warn the local population of the presence of mines or UXO. The Mine Action Programme has managed to reduce the number of high-impacted communities by almost half – since the initial data was collected – through a combination of clearance, marking and mine risk education.

The key thing about the Afghanistan Mine Action Programme, or MAPA, is that in addition to being the oldest and the largest, it is also the programme with the most national support and participation.

The MAPA receives policy guidance from the Afghan Government through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and works closely with related ministries like the Ministry of Martyrs and Disabled, and employs 10,0000 Afghans through a dozen implementing partners, many of which are Afghan NGOs such as ATC, DAFA, MCPA, MDC and OMAR.

Without the Afghan deminers, many of whom have been with the programme for more than 15 years, and without the commitment of Afghan government officials, including former Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Dr. Mohammed Haider Reza, there is no question that Afghanistan's mine action programme could not exist. It is this tremendous national support that is helping pave the way for a transition of responsibility of the MAPA from the United Nations to a national, government-owned mine action agency.

The process of the transition is under way, and the target for a handover to the Afghan government is within the next two years. However, the time frame will be flexible and will be dependent on the speed with which the national institutions are created.

The transition process started in June 2005 and will be facilitated by a Mine Action Transition Coordination Office staffed by UNDP and UNMACA. National staff members of UNMACA, Afghan government officials and the directors of the Afghan implementing partners are integral to this transition process as current and future stakeholders in mine action.

The objective of this coordinating office is to assist the government in developing national mine action policies and to develop the structures and capacity development systems. It will be vital to ensure that the national structures are truly sustainable for the future, and so this does not mean simply taking the existing MACA and rebranding it as a national institution.

It will also be critical to maintain donor commitments during the transition process and for the foreseeable future. After seeing a surge in funding following the fall of the Taliban at the end of 2001, the Mine Action Programme for Afghanistan is currently projecting a funding shortfall in 2006. This is mainly due to the fact that a number of large-scale reconstruction projects, which have employed a considerable number of deminers, will be completed around the middle of the year.

As yet, we have been unable to identify other funds either through humanitarian or bilateral sources to keep these teams employed once the reconstruction tasks are completed. If no new donor commitments are made, we will be forced to reduce the number of demining teams employed in the field.

A reduction in capacity will have obvious implications on enabling the Afghan government to meet objectives required by the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Treaty signed in March 2003, the Millennium Development Goals and the Afghanistan National Development Strategy.

We hope to deliver the Mine Action Programme for Afghanistan to the government in the coming years and are working hard to secure the funding that will enable the programme to continue successfully under national management. We hope that our donors will allow us to hand over a mine action programme that has enough sufficient financial resources to meet its many important targets in the future and one of those is an Afghanistan free of the threat of mines by 2013.

We are making good progress toward this goal and with the required funding we and the Afghan government can continue to make headway towards achieving this target.

Question and Answer

Question: Do you think the government can handle and manage the programme?

John Flanagan: I'm extremely confident in the ability of the Afghan government to manage this programme once the UN reduces its responsibilities. We're not going to rush into the transition process. The United Nations are going to ensure that the necessary capacity and capabilities are developed with the Afghan government to make sure that this transition can be achieved successfully.

Question: Can you tell us the status of the monitoring mechanism for the Afghanistan Compact?

Spokesman: There is movement with the Afghanistan Compact and in the next few days you will be hearing about the inauguration of the Joint Coordination and Monitoring Board. So as not to pre-empt any announcements that the government may want to make, I will leave it at that for now.

Question: Can you tell us about US$1.5 million in missing funds from the Khair Khana hospital project, which UNOPS is involved in?

Spokesman: Once again, this is not a UNAMA project. I am sure that if the answers we have [already] given you don't satisfy then UNOPS would be delighted to provide you with any information you need.

Let me say that in the last few months, we have had a lot of questions from the press about aid effectiveness, about whether the UN is spending money properly. We have endeavored over many weeks and many months to provide you with all the answers we can, with hard facts about where money is being spent, and about what is being done to improve aid effectiveness. You know by now that an entire section of the Afghanistan Compact is devoted to this issue, as is an entire chapter of the I-ANDS (Interim Afghanistan National Development Strategy). I think the UN provides terrific value for money in Afghanistan. We have a policy of complete transparency, and every project we are involved in is signed off on by the government. We are providing the best expertise there is internationally available to Afghanistan in its rebuilding.

With the particular project in question, this began back in 2002. We have put the questions that you have asked us previously to UNFPA and UNOPS and they tell us they are satisfied that things were done in the right way. More generally, it is worth noting that aid effectiveness, is something that always improves over time. I think the level of oversight on such projects we can apply today is different from what we could do in 2002. When you are involved in such work, this is simply a reality.

Question: (inaudible – on demining)

John Flanagan: The key thing is that the UN has been responsible for the programme for the last 15 years and has built quite a big structure to manage a complex programme. It's been our experience in other countries like Cambodia that when the UN builds big structures and then tries to hand over to the national government things fail pretty quickly and donors start to lose confidence.

At the moment all of the national staff who work to coordinate mine action under the MAPA are UN employees. We need to construct a national structure that is responsible for the management of the programme. Until that structure is established by Afghan law, has all the systems and processes for managing itself, we have got nothing to hand over to. The process is not that the government doesn't have the capability to manage this, there is no national structure that exists right now to take that responsibility. The important thing is we're talking about a period of up to two years. I think if it goes quicker than that, then we'll certainly hand over as the capability is developed within the national institutions.

Question: When responsibility for the programme is handed over, will money go directly to the government?

John Flanagan: That's a matter for the government and the donors to come to agreement on. At the moment, the funds come through a variety of channels – through the government, bilaterally to the NGOs or through the UN. In the future all of the funding options will be open for continued support by the donors.

Question: Which parts of the country are most heavily mined?

Daniel Bellamy, Programme Manager, UNMACA: Some years ago we did a survey and most of the mined areas in Afghanistan are around Kabul and on the main roads from Kandahar to Kabul and from Kabul to the north, to Mazar and Kunduz. There are also some pockets around Heart and Jalalabad.