Although the U.S. government has dedicated more than $1 billion to improving the plight of Afghan women in the past three years, officials can’t determine if the investment has produced positive results because none of the agencies involved can account for all their programs.
Hundreds of programs from the Department of Defense, Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development may have promoted women’s rights and gender equality, but the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction was unable to say for sure because no agency kept accurate records of results, the watchdog said in a report made public Thursday.
While the departments and agencies spent more than $64.8 million between 2011 and 2013 on 635 programs meant exclusively to help Afghan women, USAID and State could not specify what proportion of the $850 million they put toward 17 additional projects that supported the same cause, the report said.
The agencies struggled to produce full lists of their work on behalf of women in Afghanistan because responsibility for the efforts was “fragmented, with different types of programs handled in different offices and locations,” SIGAR said. “There was no office responsible for overseeing, obtaining, and tracking comprehensive information on these efforts.”
Since Congress passed the Afghan Women and Children Relief Act in December 2001, the federal government has set aside millions to grow access to education and healthcare for women and children in Afghanistan. Congress gave State and USAID $627 million between 2003 and 2010 for that effort, SIGAR said.
From 2011 to 2013, Congress did not appropriate specific funds for helping Afghan women, but the Pentagon, State and USAID continued their programs.
“Although U.S. agencies have reported that conditions for women in Afghanistan have improved since 2001, those same agencies, as well as members of Congress, nongovernmental organizations, and members of Afghan civil society have expressed concerns that any gains made in this area may be difficult to sustain,” SIGAR said.
Examples of such programs include a grant project that trained 40 women entrepreneurs in business and the construction of a girl’s school in a rural province, SIGAR said.
None of the agencies had the ability to track expenses by gender, the report found. For example, USAID officials told the watchdog their systems can’t categorize programs by gender and that their contractors don’t provide it with such information in the first place, the report said.
None of the agencies have evaluated the overall impact of their efforts on Afghan women, the report also found.
One federal official told SIGAR the agencies had viewed the requirement to measure each program’s effectiveness as an “optimistic, aspirational statement” rather than a mandate.
While agency officials have pointed to the difficulty of collecting such data as the main reason for its failure to produce comprehensive reports, the watchdog said the information “already exists” in the agency’s systems.
“In other words, the agencies likely already have the information necessary to assess their overall efforts but have not taken the steps to extract and synthesize it,” the report said.
Although all three of the agencies plan to continue or raise the level of funding they dedicate to Afghan women, none have developed a plan to track results past the end of 2014, the report said.
SIGAR said it expects the problem to worsen next year, when the U.S. will scale back its involvement in the country.
Even so, Pentagon officials said they plan to “significantly increase” its gender-specific programs after the end of 2014 with a $25 million investment into a defense program aimed at recruiting Afghan women.
