Come together, right now, in Tokyo

I have invited members of  the PRT to use my blog to talk about their work. This instalment comes from Marie-Louise Hoilund-Carlsen in the PRT’s Socio-Economic Development Team. 

These are some of the top items on the to-do list this week – they have been for the past couple of months and will guide our work for many more to come. This to-do list, determining the work of the Helmand Provincial Reconstruction Team’s (HPRT) education team, bears striking resemblance to the to-do list of our neighbouring colleagues in the health team.

Why is this, since health and education are two distinct sectors?

Our tattered scraps of paper highlighting tasks accomplished and still to be completed – our teams’ shared to-do lists – can be seen as the concrete representation of a renewed unity of effort between service delivery sectors.

Health and education have always shared broad objectives, but on the eve of transition, as people and resources in the HPRT become fewer yet goals remain important and challenging, the health and education teams are moving ever closer. This convergence recognises that programmatically, administratively and even policy-wise we have had similar successes – increases in access and facilities – but now face similar challenges.

But what do the HPRT’s merging to-do-lists have to do with the recent Tokyo conference?

We in the HPRT would venture to say that Tokyo is a micro-level example of what is required for the overall development process in Afghanistan to continue: pooling resources; committing to true coordination and priorities that ultimately drive up quality of services. This means not only starting joint “to-do lists”, but also beginning to tick off each other’s chores and hold each other to account for finishing them.

For health and education in Helmand, progress until now has been nothing shy of impressive: there are Comprehensive Health Clinics (CHCs) in 12 out of 14 districts in Helmand; 26 doctors, 101 nurses, 40 midwifes or community midwifes, and over 750 community health workers (CHWs) workers available to the Helmandi population; measles and polio vaccination campaigns are carried out on a regular basis. A similar pattern of expansion is mirrored by the education sector, with recent figures showing 121,797 students attending 164 schools – compared to just 47 open schools in 2007.  28,074 female students are now enrolled – an impressive increase of 432% since 2005.

By coming together now and re-focusing joint efforts of ever fewer HPRT staff, we still stand a good chance of stabilising this positive trajectory. We are exploring new, exciting and more cost effective ways of satisfying an ever-increasing demand for services, as well as delivering sustainable measures of quality.

Community based services are the cornerstone of the Afghan service delivery system for both education and healthcare. Such inspiring initiatives not only enable communities to cater for their own needs through training delivered in communities by specialised NGOs, but they also crucially link communities to the Afghan government in the long run because they are monitored by local authorities.

Small amounts of resources directed at community levels has proven extremely effective, reaching the most remote locations whilst building a sound level of literacy and basic healthcare to equip communities with simple, yet vital tools to improving their own lives.