|Democratic Governance|
|Poverty Reduction|
|Crisis Prevention and Recovery|
|Energy and Environment|

Promoting national initiatives to empower the poor

Five years since the end of the Taliban regime, Afghanistan now stands at the crossroad of recovery and development. While notable progress has been made on various socio-economic fronts, significant challenges remain unattended – or are on the rise.

The unprecedented scale of urbanisation poses challenges to urban governance and livelihood and especially issues of socio-economic integration of migrants, including the expansion of informal settlements with poor livelihood conditions and acute shortage of accommodating infrastructure.

Unemployment persists especially in urban areas as well as among a number of demobilised ex-combatants, and given still the highly volatile security situation in some parts of the country, it is a major constraint for overall human security.

The plight of the most vulnerable groups – including returnees and Internally Displaced Persons, ex-combatants, the disabled and vulnerable women – continues, as the population in general suffers from the staggering pace of development and those most vulnerable still remain marginalised and disadvantaged in terms of social and economic opportunities.

Rural Afghanistan, which supports the main industry of Afghanistan – agriculture, the lack of technical and infrastructure capacity including clean affordable energy, perpetuates socio- economic insecurity. Despite the profound agricultural potential of the country, the lack of rural entrepreneurship, non-existent market linkages, the lack of access to financing and technology options and weak private sector enabling framework is a major hindrance to promoting private sector vibrancy and job creation.

The harsh climatic and geographical conditions dominating most of the territory, combined with the long years of conflict followed by the rapid population growth, have led to uncontrolled and unsustainable use of natural resources. The destruction of the resource base and degradation of ecosystem services, couple with the proliferation of illicit poppy economy and vulnerability to natural disasters in major parts of the country, is of serious concern and poses a threat to long-term development of the country as a whole.

The government capacity to tackle all these problems remains limited both at the central and regional level. Considerable support for government’s capacity and institutional building remains high on the country’s development agenda as well as that of UNDP.

UNDP provides multi-layered, multisectoral support through the national-level policy and institutional support, sub-national and community level capacity development and empowerment. UNDP runs a number of projects in the areas of rural and urban development, policy support to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), private sector development, counter narcotics, environment and disaster management. The issues of gender, disaster risk reduction and environment remain cross-cutting, and primary focus on support for vulnerable groups, are mainstreamed among those various projects.

UNDP Afghanistan is promoting national initiatives to empower the poor by focusing on the following activities:

Projects

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