Aid Dependency and Institutional Capacity Building in Afghanistan: How Aid Dependency Undermines Institutions Building Ministry of Education (Case Study)

Studying the relationship between “Aid Dependency” and “Institutional Capacity Development” in conflict affected countries is at the core of debates on effectiveness of foreign aid and assistance. This research paper studies and analysis the mechanisms of foreign aid delivery and its adverse impacts on institutions building at Ministry of Education (as case study), Government of Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. The paper argues that long term aid dependency undermines the quality of institutions and is negatively associated with building permanent in-house capacities. The paper focuses on changing the mechanisms of aid delivery, particularly bypassing the recipient government financial and budgetary channels. It argues that, setting up temporary and independent project implementation units parallel to the existing government institutions cause severe problems such as fragmentation of policies and projects, poaching and syphoning off the scarce qualified staff from already weak and decaying public institutions, missing opportunity of learning by doing, and increase the culture of dependency. While the argument of aid dependency and its adverse impact on institutional capacity building doesn’t not mean that foreign should be decreased, this paper concludes that, aid has the potential to improve and strengthen the public institutions if it is delivered through the government budgetary system with the long term and clear development agendas to improve the service delivery, to strengthen the institutional planning capacity and to establish a strong civil services administration with a permanent in-house capacity.