WFP Regional Bureau for Asia and the Pacific - 2016 SPRs RBB 2016 SPRs by country | Page 23

Standard Project Report 2016
Gender inequality remains pervasive in Afghanistan. WFP continued to challenge this paradigm through its
programme design and explored options for improving women's participation in food assistance and
decision-making both internally and externally. In the past year alone, women's participation in asset creation, which
has traditionally been considered a male-dominated project activity, increased from 1 percent in 2015 to
12 percent in 2016, as a result of specifically designed activities for women aimed at building agricultural assets
such as mushroom or pickle production and establishment of tree nurseries. Without female monitors, direct access
to female beneficiaries is hampered. To ensure continued and uninterrupted dialogue with the most vulnerable
beneficiaries, female monitors have been engaged in all provinces, and the first female PAT team leader was
recruited in early 2016. These developments have resulted in a trebling of women's responses in post-distribution
monitoring across all project activities, from 12 percent in 2015 to 38 percent in 2016.
Inspired by the positive changes in reaching women, but with limited evidence to prove long-term effect, WFP
Afghanistan took the initiative to develop a new outcome indicator for the vocational skills training programme:
‘proportion of graduates who have generated income using the skills obtained through the vocational skills training
(VST) programme (six months post-graduation)’. The baseline data collected from 160 female graduates in four
provinces, indicated that 45 percent had generated income six months after graduation (39 percent through wage
employment; and 6 percent through self-employment). However, only 6 percent (26 respondents) generated above
AFN 1,500 (USD 22) per month. In addition, participation influenced intra-family dynamics in that 77 percent of all
women confirmed that they had earned a higher degree of decision-making, as the WFP cash incentive enabled
them to contribute to the household income and their participation in a recognised institution offered a degree of
independence. The indicator is likely to have application beyond Afghanistan and is under review by the WFP
regional bureau for potential corporate implementation.
WFP Afghanistan launched the corporate operational management database called COMET (Country Office Tool
for Managing (programme operations) Effectively) in January 2016. The systems transition fostered a new corporate
culture with new accountabilities across functional units as it redefines how data is captured and utilised across the
organization. Streamlined processes, decentralisation and field-level accountability for data entry have enabled
real-time reporting. which in turn improved WFP Afghanistan's programme management and accountability to
affected populations.
Results/Outcomes
WFP Afghanistan reached 3.3 million food-insecure and undernourished people in 2016, representing more than
95 percent of planned beneficiaries. However, because of reduced donor funding, WFP
had to decrease ration sizes in most activities, in some cases by half, and/or shorten the duration of activities thus
negatively affecting the intended outputs/outcomes. The decreased measures were decided after a regular and
thorough review of the programme criticality, targeting criteria and other operational arrangements (security,
partnerships, local capacities and commitment) had been conducted to prioritise life-saving assistance, and targeted
only severely food-insecure people in highly food-insecure districts.
Strategic Objective: Save lives and protect livelihoods in emergencies (SO1).
Outcome: Stabilised or improved food consumption over assistance period for targeted households and/or
individuals.
Activity: General Distribution (GD).
The Food Consumption Score (FCS) is a proxy for household food security, using a combination of food diversity
and frequency weighted by the relative nutritional importance of different food groups. Results from post-distribution
monitoring show that on average, 23 percent of the households had poor food consumption, significantly higher
compared with 16 percent in 2015. In 2016, as a result of funding shortfalls, WFP responded through cut rations for
general food distribution (GFD) beneficiaries, and reduced the duration of assistance for households receiving
seasonal support from three to two months. This adjustment likely resulted in households with borderline food
consumption slipping into the poor food consumption group because of the reduced levels of assistance. Building
on the lesson learned, WFP will increase its targeting efforts and prioritise only the most vulnerable people for this
type of assistance in the future, rather than reducing the entitlement.
There are substantial differences in terms of food consumption by region. The north-east and central highlands
regions have higher levels of poor food consumption, with more than one-third of households having poor food
consumption. Badakshan is the province of main concern in the north-east region characterised by physical
accessibility problems, food deficit, low employment opportunities, dependency on rain-fed production, high risk of
natural disasters, and long winters resulting in complete lack of production and employment opportunities.
Afghanistan, Islamic Republic of (A