I have been so tired today, I think the weekend working and travelling finally caught up with me. I was shivering with cold and tiredness: Kabul is soooo cold. So after a morning of reading the Job Descriptions of all the admin staff I went to lie down.
I was reading the job descriptions because I was keen to know who is supposed to travel to support provincial offices. One of the main complaints from my trip to Jalalabad was that people in Kabul were not giving them enough support. Obviously the security situation is making this worse, but it seems unfair that Programme staff should have to travel to Kabul but administrators in the capital are not as keen to travel.
I have also began to hammer through the numbers. The actual admin costs are not that high, the problem seems to be that a lot of the activity that is neither program nor administration is soaking up costs. Activities such as Strategy and Policy, Public Information, Monitoring and Evaluation and the efforts of Gender Advisors to tackle the historic problems in Afghanistan for instance the lack of education for girls under the Taliban means that there are far fewer qualified women. I think most development agencies would regard this sort of work as fundamental, but the difficulty is finding someone to pay for it.
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