International DevelopmentWritten evidence submitted by ActionAid

Introduction

1. We welcome the decision of the International Development Committee to conduct an Inquiry into the Future of Afghanistan. Afghanistan is at a vital juncture as the date for withdrawal of NATO troops draws close. It is therefore timely that the UK government should take stock of its impact so far to inform decisions about how to secure the development and security of Afghanistan’s people in the future.

2. ActionAid has chosen to focus our submission on the issue of women’s rights in Afghanistan as this is an area where we have considerable programme experience and have conducted prior research and advocacy.

The Importance of Women’s Rights in the Future of Afghanistan

3. Securing women’s rights was one of the main goals of the UK’s intervention in Afghanistan in 2001.1 In addition, the Department for International Development (DFID) has prioritised the rights of women and girls in its work.2 The status and security of women can therefore be used as a litmus test of the UK’s impact and legacy in the country. In establishing what the UK government is achieving in Afghanistan, it is important to ask: how are women’s lives improving as a result of the UK’s support and what should the UK be doing now to defend women’s rights?

4. Over the past decade, the UK government has helped achieve much towards this effort, including:

Establishing a new constitution which enshrines equal rights for women and men.3

Enacting a new landmark Elimination of Violence against Women (EVAW) law.

Initial endorsement of a new National Action Plan for the Women of Afghanistan (NAPWA).4

Establishing women’s shelters for the first time.5

Ensuring just over 27% of MPs are women.6

Ensuring 25% of government jobs are filled by women.7

Ensuring over 2 million girls are now in school.8

Ensuring more women are free to participate in public life and to work outside their homes as doctors, teachers, entrepreneurs and lawyers—a situation once made impossible by the Taliban.

5. These gains, whilst highly significant, are unfortunately not equitably distributed. Women in rural areas, particularly in the more conservative southern provinces, are still facing restrictions and violence when working outside the home. Many women across the country still lack basic rights like access to justice and economic independence from men.9 The maternal mortality rate remains high, with one woman dying every two hours due to pregnancy-related causes.10 Almost nine in 10 women over the age of 15 are illiterate.11 And girls’ school enrolment figures are not matched by attendance, with early and forced marriage12 and attacks on girls’ schools13 still major barriers to girls’ education. Alarmingly, 87% of women face at least one form of domestic violence, with some experiencing several.14

6. It is clear therefore that a) the UK government can and has made a difference to women’s rights in Afghanistan, and that b) there is still a difference to be made. As the UK approaches 2014 and the planned withdrawal of troops, there is a danger that gains already made will either not be sustained, or worse, will be reversed.

Violence Against Women as an Indicator of Progress

7. Violence against women and girls within Afghanistan is an appropriate indicator of both development and security progress in the country. A recent survey by ActionAid of 1000 women from across Afghanistan found:15

Two-thirds feel their lives have improved over the last 10 years.

But 9 out of 10 fear a return to Taliban-style government with one third specifically worried about international troops leaving.

Violence against women remains a pressing security concern:

The biggest fear of women under 30 is sexual assault.

All women were more fearful of sexual assault than they are of abduction, kidnapping or being caught in an explosion—combined.

8. Meanwhile women who enter public life do so at significant risk:

Khan Mohammad was head of a girls’ school in Logar province. She was killed in May 2011.16

Sitara Achakzai was a provincial council member in Kandahar. She was killed in April 2009.17

Malalai Kakar was the highest-ranking female police officer in Kandahar. She led a 10-woman police unit focused on domestic violence. She was killed in September 2008.18

Safiye Amajan was the provincial director of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs. She was killed in September 2006.19

9. Violence against women and girls is a gross violation of human rights. It also presents a fundamental barrier to eradicating poverty and building peace. ActionAid has shown that violence against women and girls blocks progress across the major development agendas.20 For example, violence against girls was a major factor causing the 2005 Millennium Development Goal of achieving gender parity in schooling to be missed because girls are subject to routine violence in, around and on the journeys to and from school, and are forced into early marriages, causing them to drop out of school at much higher rates than boys. In the case of Afghanistan, girls in school have specifically been targeted as part of the insurgency movement.21

10. Violence against women is a defining characteristic of Afghanistan’s particular development and security situation, with attacks on women—especially those in public life—and on women’s rights organisations being positively correlated with increased Taliban presence, especially following transition of security powers to Afghan National Security Forces. The protection of women (in the public sphere) must be a priority for the transitional period and beyond.

The UK government now has a clear and time-limited window in which to defend and entrench the progress made in advancing women’s rights in Afghanistan. ActionAid recommends it uses all available levers to prioritise and achieve this objective, including focusing on ensuring that UK aid is used to maximum effect to advance women’s rights and in particular to tackle violence against women.

The Role of UK Aid in Advancing Women’s Rights

11. As noted above, supporting women’s and girls’ empowerment and gender equality is high on DFID’s agenda. It is one of six departmental priorities in the DFID Business Plan, with four priority results areas in girls’ education, women’s economic empowerment, eliminating violence against girls and women, and improving maternal health and reproductive rights.

“You cannot begin to understand development unless you place the position [of] girls and women in the poorest parts of the world right at the heart and centre of everything you do.”
Andrew Mitchell MP, Secretary of State for International Development22

12. Afghanistan is one of the UK’s top foreign policy priorities and it is therefore unsurprising that DFID is a major presence there. It is the third-largest bilateral donor in the country, and has made a forward commitment to give £178 million per year up to and including 2015. The UK is also expected to play a strong role at the forthcoming (July 2012) Tokyo donor conference on aid to Afghanistan for the period up to 2025. Through its consistent support to the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF) since 2002, the UK has contributed to the impressive gains in education, health and infrastructure development highlighted above.

DFID’s Approach to Women’s Rights to Date

13. Despite DFID’s stated commitment to putting women and girls at the centre of development efforts, it has not made securing women’s rights a strategic priority area for its Afghanistan programme.23 Its strategic priority areas are: peace, security and stability; economic stability, growth and jobs; getting the state to deliver improved services.

14. Instead, DFID’s approach is to mainstream gender as a cross-cutting theme through its work. The Afghanistan Operational Plan 2011–2015 states that:

“Our work will empower Afghan women. We will help build a peaceful state and society that will tackle poverty and create wealth for Afghan men and women. Increased political and economic participation of women will improve their lives and help reduce the risk of Afghanistan remaining in conflict.”

15. It is certainly appropriate that gender should be mainstreamed in all of DFID’s programme work, given the pervasiveness of gender inequality in Afghanistan. However this is a necessary but insufficient part of the integrated approach needed.

16. It is also difficult to assess how effectively mainstreaming is being implemented and what change if any it is bringing about in women’s lives. Only 11 projects (of 92 listed) on the DFID projects database have published documents24 and out of these, only one contains an explicit commitment to gender or women’s issues.25 A review of the Operational Plan 2011–15 also reveals that there is a gender-disaggregated target in only one Strategic Priority Area—education.

17. The Operational Plan specifies that at least half of the UK’s annual budget should be channelled through the Government of Afghanistan’s (GOA) systems. DFID is to be commended for this as it conforms to best practice standards in aid effectiveness. The major funding from the UK goes through the ARTF, a multi-donor trust fund to support reconstruction through on-budget support for the GOA’s priority programmes. Again, gender-disaggregated targets are cited only for the education elements of the programme. It is notable that improving gender equality in education is one of the much-quoted success stories of DFID’s aid to Afghanistan, raising the possibility that having such targets is at least a factor in leading to success.

18. The Business Case for the ARTF does discuss gender briefly as part of its section on Social Appraisal, noting that “many programmes lack a clear gender strategy, while tracking and monitoring progress on results is more ad hoc than systematic.” DFID’s response to this shortcoming is to commit to lobbying the GOA, which—though welcome—seems inadequate when we consider how urgent and extreme the problems facing Afghan women are. This is emblematic of the challenges inherent in influencing outcomes through this kind of on-budget support, since these are out of DFID’s direct control.

19. The GOA’s major policy framework for ensuring gender equality in its National Development Strategy is the National Action Plan for Women in Afghanistan (NAPWA).26 DFID provided an advisor to the GOA to help support the NAPWA by ensuring that the Afghanistan National Development Strategy integrated cross-cutting issues such as gender equality into sector plans.27 However, commentators have questioned the GOA’s commitment to the NAPWA, and say that it has been largely dormant without support from the international community.28 ActionAid Afghanistan and Oxfam Afghanistan are currently conducting research evaluating the implementation and impact of the NAPWA and international support for it, expected to be published in June 2012.

20. DFID has made some efforts to balance its support to government with funding to community-based and national civil society organisations and there are a number of programmes that are doing good work to improve the rights of women.

21. The National Solidarity Programme (NSP),29 which has received some £31 million from the UK to date, is a community development programme that has won considerable favour with civil society in Afghanistan for supporting the formation of Community Development Councils (CDCs) and funding their work. NSP has enabled 29,224 women to be part of the CDCs, with an additional 60,000 participating in women’s committees.30 A recent gender equity study on the NSP31 found that:

“NSP has achieved unprecedented, widespread involvement of women in rural Afghanistan’s community decision-making apparatus with interesting and exciting changes albeit on a modest scale which can be built up with appropriate interventions.”

22. Another potentially promising initiative is the Tawanmandi project, a new national programme that aims to strengthen civil society and its relationship with the Government in order to improve the Government’s accountability and responsiveness. According to its website, Tawanmandi “approaches its mission with gender, youth, disability and out-of-Kabul CSOs as cross-cutting themes” which means that not only will such groups benefit from the fund, but that the inclusion of these groups in all project proposals will be “a parameter in funding decisions”.32 DFID is supporting Tawanmandi to the tune of £20 million over the next five years, and officials say they are optimistic that it will fund projects supporting women’s rights to justice. However, Tawanmandi is still only in its infancy.

23. These programmes could form the foundation of more strategic support to women’s rights in the years to come. However, without further strengthening, such efforts appear rather piecemeal in comparison to the extreme situation of women’s rights in Afghanistan. On the basis of the available evidence, it is difficult to see that much has changed since this finding in a 2009 Evaluation of DFID’s Afghanistan programme:33

“Despite some impressive outputs [of DFID’s programme in Afghanistan] the overall integration of gender, human rights and social exclusion issues has been weak throughout this portfolio.”

ActionAid urges that stronger efforts be made to ensure that women’s rights are truly embedded through gender mainstreaming in DFID’s programming in Afghanistan. In addition we recommend such efforts should be augmented by direct funding of organisations and programmes that are leading the struggle to end violence against women, given the scale of the problem of violence against and its inherent links to peace and development in Afghanistan.

DFID and Violence Against Women and Girls

24. ActionAid’s 2011 report, “A Just Peace?” found that security is the main concern in Afghan women’s lives, above worries over income, employment, health or education. Women’s rights improved slowly but steadily up to 2006, when the security situation worsened as the Taliban insurgency gained ground. As the date of troop withdrawal approaches, women have become extremely fearful that they will lose the achievements of the last 10 years. Women “human rights defenders”—those trying to provide access to education and health for women and girls in areas controlled or influenced by Taliban insurgents—are particularly at risk.

25. Afghan women want to see an end to war, but they do not want a return to any form of government that does not respect the human rights of women. As the date of troop withdrawal approaches, there is growing evidence that women’s rights organisations are being marginalised in processes to secure peace, security and development in the future of Afghanistan.34 ^, 35There is also increasing concern that the effort to bring on board “moderate” elements of the Taliban may result in women’s rights being negotiated away.36 The consequence of processes that are not representative of women’s rights and interests is highly likely to be a return to instability and conflict.

26. With troops withdrawn, the major tools at the UK’s disposal to tackle violence against women and girls will be diplomatic pressure and aid. The UK has recognised the importance of protecting women’s rights in the future of Afghanistan through its recent adoption of an Afghanistan Country Plan in the UK government National Action Plan on UNSCR 1325 Women Peace and Security (UK NAP).37 The UK NAP specifies actions for DFID, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and the Ministry of Defence (MOD). If the UK NAP is implemented, it has the potential to advance women’s rights and in particular to make prevention of violence against women a top priority for the UK during Afghanistan’s “transitional decade”.

ActionAid recommends that DFID’s work in Afghanistan fully responds to the goals, activities and measures identified in the UK NAP. We also urge future revisions of the UK NAP to go much further in putting in place measures to protect Afghan women from violence and put women’s rights at the heart of the UK’s actions in Afghanistan. Crucially, the UK must support the full implementation the NAPWA and the 2009 EVAW law, and must ensure the full participation of women’s rights organisations in decision-making processes for the transitional period in Afghanistan.

27. It is disappointing that DFID does not directly fund programmes to tackle violence against women. The UK NAP does specify a number of national-level actions for DFID, but these appear relatively undemanding. It is unclear what, if any, additional spending is required to make these happen, or whether they are simply to be achieved through improved project design and monitoring of results. Given the prevalence of violence against women, and the risks that women face during and after the period of troop withdrawal and political settlement, it is essential that all elements of UK policy in Afghanistan equally prioritise ending violence against women. To this end, the commitments outlined in the UK government’s Building Stability Overseas Strategy (BSOS)38 offer a promising start.

28. ActionAid believes that the enactment of the EVAW law will be a landmark development for Afghan women. The legislation criminalises child marriage, forced marriage, forced self-immolation and 19 other acts of violence against women including rape and so-called “moral crimes” such as “running away” or “intention to commit adultery”. It is precisely these rights violations that have prevented women participating in public life and have seriously constrained women’s ability to benefit from development in Afghanistan. ActionAid Afghanistan has direct experience of trying to ensure a fair deal from the law for Afghan women through its Paralegal Project, which trains women paralegals to work with communities to raise awareness of their legal rights and help women survivors of violence.

29. However, there is still a long way to go in ensuring full implementation of the EVAW law. A 2011 report from the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights39 found that while there is growing implementation of the law, it is still being used inconsistently, and harmful traditional practices are still highly prevalent.40 It draws attention to the low numbers of complaints and cases prosecuted, as evidence that the Government has not yet applied the law to the vast majority of cases of violence against women. Cases of violence reported to the police continue to be treated outside the formal justice system and there is still weak support for the victims of violence, for example through provision of shelter services. There are few women lawyers police officers or judges.41 And women and girls’ lack of knowledge of the protective provisions of the law are further challenges for its effective implementation. Women’s organisations say they receive little direct funding from the international community, which limits their ability to engage in wide-ranging activities.42

We therefore urge that DFID provides assistance to increase the capacity of the justice system to implement EVAW. DFID should also make resources available to women’s rights organisations to raise awareness of the law, provide complementary services such as shelters and counselling for victims of violence against women, and engage in advocacy for changes in policy and process to advance women’s rights.

Further Recommendations

Strengthening DFID’s approach to mainstreaming gender in its work in Afghanistan

30. ActionAid applauds DFID for keeping to its commitment to channel half of its funding through the GOA. However, we urge that greater energy is put into ensuring that its support explicitly advances gender equality and women’s rights in Afghanistan.

The next DFID Operational Plan for Afghanistan (post-2014) should include an explicit priority goal on securing women’s rights and tackling violence against women and girls as a key constraint to achieving development goals in the country.

The next DFID Operational Plan should also set out how DFID intends to support the national Priority Programme “Capacity Development to Accelerate NAPWA implementation”.

Future support to the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund should include disaggregated targets for men and women across all its programmes.

DFID should increase support to the GOA to improve gender-disaggregated data collection and gender-responsive budgeting for future development strategies.

DFID should continue the good work undertaken through the NSP in improving women’s participation and representation in public life, and should ensure that Tawanmandi is able to learn from this good practice.

Increasing direct UK support to end violence against women and girls in Afghanistan

31. ActionAid deplores the persistent and extreme violations of women’s rights in Afghanistan through acts of violence against women. ActionAid further believes that violence against women is holding back vital progress in development in the country. DFID, the FCO and MOD should ensure policy coherence and strategic funding in order to:

Provide technical assistance to the High Commission for Prevention of Violence Against Women, and to government initiatives aimed at enforcement of the EVAW law such as the National Priority Programme “Law and Justice For All”.

Expand programmes that aim to build capacity of provincial prosecution offices and courts particularly aimed at the EVAW law, and to national awareness campaigns, assistance and training for prevention of violence against women.

Develop a systematic approach to supporting women’s “human rights defenders” and support the GOA to develop a clear plan to defend the rights of women in the public sphere.

Ensure that support to the process of civilianising the Afghan police force includes strong training on their mandate to protect women and girls from violence through enforcement of the EVAW law.

Increase direct support to women’s rights organisations for service delivery and advocacy on violence against women and girls.

Support the development of Afghanistan’s own UNSCR 1325 National Action Plan and ensure inclusion of actions and indicators on violence against women and girls and the EVAW law.

UK leadership on the issue of violence against women and girls in Afghanistan

32. The UK is a key player in the international community working in Afghanistan and has considerable influence. At the forthcoming Chicago and Tokyo conferences it should be a vocal advocate for protecting and extending women’s rights. The UK should seek to make the protection of women against violence a priority political outcome of the Tokyo conference with an appropriate—and substantial—allocation of new funds to achieve it.

33. The UK should also continue to actively advocate with the GOA to ensure that all future strategies put women’s development and rights at the front and centre of their development efforts. The UK should ensure that women’s rights organisations are consulted on all national strategies, plans and laws, and should champion their participation at international conferences and summits on the future of Afghanistan, including peace processes.

May 2012