A decade of development

Yesterday I went to a conference organised by the Afghan Chamber of Commerce and Industry in the quite magnificent Kabul Star Hotel. The topic of the conference was the economic impact of the 2014 military withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The opening presentation was by the World Bank. Richard Hogg (ex DFID, now World Bank and a well-known Kabul face) told us about the four hundred and something billion dollars that the international community has expended on Afghanistan since 2001. Then Bill Byrd (who has been in and out of Kabul for about as long as I have) talked us through the economic implications of cutting all this spending.

I have spent most of the last 10 years in Afghanistan (at considerable cost to the taxpayer) trying to do my bit for private sector led economic growth. So part of me hoped that Bill would explain to the anxious audience that this anticipated reduction of military and civilian assistance would have all sorts of dire consequences for the Afghan economy. Surely catastrophe was inevitable (see recent Financial Times article on the subject) and we were staring into the abyss? How on earth could Afghanistan survive without development consultants like me?

So imagine my disappointment when Bill produced the World Bank forecasts showing that if we slash annual development assistance by an amount equivalent to 90% of Afghanistan's GDP over the decade following 2014 - assuming that the weather is reasonably good - there will be a slight reduction in the rate of economic growth (if I remember rightly, from an average of about 9% to something like 7%). And to be honest, given the margin of error in the data and the forecasts, what they were saying was that there will be nothing in it at all.

After a year of research, the finest and most-Afghan-seasoned brains at the World Bank have concluded that we can take all of the current annual cash value (and more) of  development assistance out of the Afghan economy and nobody will notice.

So there you go. Looking back on all of the wonderful things we have been doing for the last decade; those claimed impact numbers, the jobs we have created, the economic growth down to new laws and streamlined procedures, the poverty reduction we have(n't) achieved... I cannot believe that all of those flashy success stories were an exaggeration? Surely not!

But whatever you believe or don't believe, it does seem (based on WB forecasts) that so long as we only cut spending by 90% over 10 years (and it rains enough), we can leave Afghanistan quietly by the economic back door.

What can we conclude from this analysis? Either the country is now totally on the right economic path thanks to our hard work, or actually we are not quite as important as we think we are. Either way, I say job done and time well spent!



Incidentally, the conference was sponsored by one of the leading Afghan private airlines, which is presumably why the registration queues were so long, we were confined in a small crowded space for 4 hours, it started late, there was nowhere to sit comfortably and they forgot to serve the tea. 

Sorry if that is harsh, but couldn't resist the cheap joke!