Engineering
Bringing power to spread knowledge
Almost 30 years of war have devastated Afghanistan’s infrastructure so from the smallest hamlet to the capital Kabul, power is generally supplied by generators.
Fuel is expensive and unfriendly to the environment so generators often run for just a few hours each day.
This limits economic activity, stops children from studying after dark and, by preventing villagers from watching television, ensures that they are ignorant of events and changes in Afghanistan.
Afghanaid works with local villages to help them build micro hydro-power schemes where the terrain is suitable to provide reliable and ‘green’ electricity.
Afghanaid has assisted hundreds of rural communities, most are very remote and poor, with access to power / electricity through construction of Micro-hydro Power (MHP) interventions. Hundreds of thousands of Afghan women, men and children have benefited from this assistance over the last few years.
In most cases, communities make non-monetary contribution through their labour and time in such projects. One of the pre-requisite of such type of assistance is to have expressed commitment and agreement from the community, at the outset of the project, to pool their resources and manage a post-project Operations and Maintenance (O&M) system to ensure the facility and services built under the project continue to be sustained and managed by the community. We train selected community people in related technical skills and equip them with a tool kit to facilitate the post-project O&M work.
The villages of Khisraw and Istakan in Badakhshan are a kilometre apart and have a combined population of 1,300.Villagers used generators but because of the cost of fuel, only two-thirds of families had access to them and could only run them for a few hours each day. Many had been refugees in Pakistan where they had greater access to electricity.
Afghanaid provided a micro-hydro power scheme with an output of 25 kilowatts which has dramatically improved life in these villages.
Increased access to television and radio has helped villagers to make more informed decisions. An example is school attendance, which had traditionally been low but has increased now parents have heard of the benefits of sending children to school.
Disaster risk reduction
Disaster risk reduction and disaster mainstreaming isone of the cross cutting themes of Afghanaid's work. Community-based disasterrisk reduction interventions including organising risk prone communities insub-committees of Community Development Councils to increase their resilience todisasters, undertaking disaster mitigation measures such as building retention wallsand protecting local livelihoods that are vulnerable to disasters.