Growing up a refugee in Pakistan, Razia Rahimi hadn’t much hope of returning home to Afghanistan, much less becoming an elected official with power to effect change. But two years ago, Razia returned to her village in Logar Province, and today she is the chairperson of an IRC-supported council making important decisions about the village’s future.
Mohammad Agha, Razia’s village, is perched on a plateau an hour’s drive south of Kabul. It sustained severe damage during the Soviet invasion and the ensuing civil war. Houses were turned into rubble and residents fled to Pakistan and elsewhere.
“After the fall of the Taliban regime, many people in the refugee camps started to return to help reconstruct their homeland and, like my family, found their communities totally destroyed,” says Razia, winding her way through the village’s mud-caked streets.
In the summer of 2003, local representatives sought IRC aid in establishing a community development council for the village. The IRC helped register voters and organize elections, and in October, Mohammad Agha held its first-ever ballot. Ten candidates were selected and Razia, who garnered the most votes, became chairperson. The IRC is now helping the village prepare proposals and implement badly needed development projects.
“We talked to people in every neighborhood and made a list of priority projects to propose to the government,” Razia explains. As a result, the village decided to reconstruct roads, bridges and power lines, build an irrigation system for surrounding orchards, rebuild the destroyed girls school and create a sewing center for unemployed women.
The IRC has supported the development work of councils like Razia’s in more than 600 war-torn villages in central and southeastern Afghanistan. The councils are the cornerstone of the National Solidarity Program, a nationwide government project aimed at strengthening local governance and providing resources so that communities can address their own reconstruction and development needs. A key partner, the IRC not only organizes the elections but also provides ongoing guidance as the councils plan, manage, monitor and evaluate their development activities.
“This program gives real decision-making power to people who never had a voice,” says the IRC’s Usman Tariq, who helps coordinate the program. “When people help their leaders determine how money is spent to meet community needs, they gain confidence in government. In Afghanistan, that’s a big achievement.”
Another success, says co-coordinator Melissa Payson, has been the participation of women.
“In spite of Afghanistan’s deeply conservative society where women are largely cloistered from public life, we found that local authorities and tribal and religious leaders embraced the idea of putting forward female candidates.”
Payson says religious leaders became some of the strongest advocates for women’s involvement, and currently women make up 40 percent of IRC-supported councils.
“I think they voted for me because I promised to help our children get a better education, and that’s more important than being a woman or a man,” says Razia, who attended IRC refugee schools in Peshawar, Pakistan, and is now a teacher.
According to Tariq, the program is bringing people together. “In one village, all the minority tribes met and agreed on common problems and needs,” he says. “People have a sense of shared responsibility and ownership for the first time in a very long time. It is wonderful.”
The IRC is also uniting communities across the country, organizing regional exchanges among the councils. Nearly 10,000 people from hundreds of villages have participated so far.
“The war created enemies between brothers,” Tariq says. “It’s inspirational to see people from my country put aside differences and embrace each other with enthusiasm after decades of war. It makes me proud.”
