The impact of a $41.2 million contract for reforming land administration in Afghanistan is unclear due to lack of oversight documentation by the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to a report from the Pentagon’s top Afghanistan watchdog.
USAID awarded the four-year, $41.2 million contract to Tetra Tech ARD in January 2011 for land reform in Afghanistan, including helping the Afghan government get revenue from government lands and mapping informal settlements to show ownership of land.
The organization had documentation of the oversight it conducted from August 2011 to September 2013, but the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction report, released on Thursday, found no documentation for the final year, representing about a quarter of the entire contract.
“Without complete records for the LARA contract, the agency cannot demonstrate that it fully performed its required contract oversight of Tetra Tech ARD or confirm that the contractor met all of the terms of the $41.2 million LARA contract,” the report says.
USAID also failed to conduct adequate sustainability assessments, missing an opportunity to provide the Afghan government with advice on how to overcome challenges and harness any gains from the program. The SIGAR report recommended that USAID conduct a final sustainability assessment, a recommendation the agency disputed, saying that a final evaluation in 2014 met all the requirements of a sustainability assessment.
The contract makes up almost half of the $96.7 million that the U.S. spent on reforming Afghanistan’s land administration system from 2004 to 2014, according to the report.
Hundreds of thousands of Afghans returning home to reclaim land they previously owned are unable to do so and, as a result, about 70 percent of urban residents in the country are squatting at the outskirts of urban areas in settlements unrecognized by the government.
Corruption is among the biggest challenges to reform the broken system, the report found.
