The evolving situation in Afghanistan is distressing; visuals of people at the Kabul airport, desperate to leave the country, are heartbreaking. This was not the situation a week ago.
With the Taliban in control of Afghanistan, the developmental projects initiated in Afghanistan over the last two decades are likely to take a back seat. I worked in Afghanistan, for over a decade, on various developmental projects. These are my experiences and observations.
Over the past twenty years, multilateral organisations undertook several developmental projects in Afghanistan. Their goal was to improve the lives of the vulnerable sections of the Afghan population. The news in the past decade focused largely on the military and the political developments; the work done by multilateral development agencies and individual countries for improving the lives of the people had been sidelined. The development projects in various sectors – education, rural development, women’s empowerment, and vocational skills development – were focused on empowering people, aimed at alleviating poverty.
Since 1979, wars ravaged Afghanistan, leading to large-scale destruction of infrastructure. From 1989 onwards, the situation worsened; in the last decade of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of people were displaced. Many sought refuge in the neighboring countries – Pakistan and Iran.
-30-
Copyright©Madras Courier, All Rights Reserved. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from madrascourier.com and redistribute by email, post to the web, mobile phone or social media.Please send in your feed back and comments to editor@madrascourier.com
