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A UNIQUE experiment in rebuilding a nation is about to begin in Afghanistan.
Donor countries have unveiled a $15 billion reconstruction programme
which calls for a small-is-beautiful strategy.

Rather than wheeling out massive nationwide projects, the rehabilitation will
begin with villages organising themselves to install solar panels and small
hydroelectricity schemes, and rebuild local roads and wrecked irrigation
canals.

Donor nations pledged an initial $3 billion towards the rebuilding at
a meeting this week in Tokyo, after the programme was outlined in a report by
the World Bank, the UN Development Programme, the Asian Development Bank and the
interim Afghan government.

Twenty years of war have left Afghanistan ravaged, says the report, with few
services and no central administration equipped to provide them. For instance,
only six people in every hundred have access to electricity. However, the report
sees no point yet in setting up a national infrastructure, such as an
electricity grid. It calls instead for “community and small-scale private
approaches” for supplying electricity, including village-managed
hydroelectricity. The report also recommends that each community should continue
to provide its own water and sanitation, and says local enterprise will be the
key to rebuilding roads.

Some ministers in the interim Afghan government are keen on this
village-based approach. One is transport minister Ishaq Shahryar, who pioneered
solar energy in the US after emigrating from Afghanistan more than 40 years ago.
Last year, before his appointment, he called for the creation of “model
villages” in post-war Afghanistan, powered by solar energy and with schools and
medical centres wired to the Internet. “Here’s a country that is destroyed. To
go back and rebuild it, my God, what a sense of opportunity,” he said.