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Accountable Assistance for Afghanistan (A³)

Accountability in the provision of development assistance is among USAID’s highest priorities in Afghanistan. By providing the majority of our assistance in non-permissive areas, some of the main challenges USAID faces include:

• ensuring that USAID resources do not benefit the Taliban or other malign groups;
• working with potentially corrupt individuals and institutions in an effort to stabilize districts and provinces; and
• monitoring and evaluating programs in insecure environments.

In light of these challenges, USAID established the Accountable Assistance for Afghanistan (A³) initiative. The purpose of the A³; initiative is to ensure the proper procedures are in place to help protect assistance dollars from being diverted from their development purpose by extortion or corruption. As a result, USAID/Afghanistan is implementing safeguards in four areas, two of which strengthen our pre-award processes and two that strengthen our post-award implementation.

Pre-Award

• Award Mechanisms – USAID/Afghanistan is increasing its usage of assistance awards that provide the most visibility on projects costs, such as cost-reimbursable contracts, and limited layers of subcontracts. The mission now includes a subcontractor clause in new awards that permits USAID to restrict the number of subcontract tiers, requires the prime contractor to perform a certain percentage of the work and prohibits subcontract “brokering” or “flipping” which is when a subcontractor passes the work to someone else and increases the risk for corruption.



• Vendor Vetting – In February 2011, USAID/Afghanistan established an internal Vetting Support Unit to perform security checks on potential USAID implementing partners. Vetting is only executed on third-country and Afghan companies and key individuals, and occurs for all prime and subcontractors with awards of $150,000 and more. All awards or sub-awards for private security contracts are vetted regardless of the award dollar value.

Post-Award

• Financial Controls – USAID/Afghanistan established a joint program with the USAID Inspector General to audit all locally incurred costs of program-funded implementing partners. The audits will be performed by internationally-accredited regionally based audit firms and checked by the Inspector General.



• Project Oversight – The mission is devolving more project monitoring responsibilities to USAID personnel in the five regional commands through the establishment of On-Site Monitors (OSMs). Each USAID project will be assigned an OSM that will provide real time data to contract staff in Kabul on project performance and accountability.

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