Afghanistan Public Policy Research Organization

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The Afghanistan Public Policy Research Organization (APPRO) is an independent social research organization promoting social and policy learning to benefit development and reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan. APPRO is registered with the Ministry of Economy of Afghanistan as a not-for-profit organization and headquartered in Kabul, Afghanistan.

APPRO Mission

APPRO’s mission is to measure development progress against strategic reconstruction objectives and provide insights into how to improve performance against the milestones set by the government of Afghanistan and the international donors. APPRO is staffed by personnel with many years of collective experience in various facets of development and scientific research.

Research is undertaken to address existing and pressing knowledge gaps in the policy making process and to advance the learning of researchers, academics, and decision and policy makers at all levels. Most of the research conducted is qualitative, utilizing state of the art qualitative research methods, supplemented with the available quantitative data. The analysis is contextualized by drawing on experiences from other regions, countries, and situations and aimed at contributing to the common knowledge pool.

Publications

All APPRO’s publications are downloadable free of charge on this website. The publications are disseminated as:

Case Studies:
Focused papers that identify, analyze, and discuss key issues to inform civil society, the government, the international community and the donors.

Synthesis Reports:
Condensed summaries of work to date on specific issues to highlight medium to long term policy options and research needs.

Policy Papers:
Comprehensive reports on specific issues based on consultation with the full spectrum of stakeholders, e.g., government officials, United Nations agencies, international donors, and national and international Civil Society Organizations.

Other:
Occasional publications put together around specific themes as edited volumes.

Below is the list of publications currently available to public.

Reconstructing Afghanistan Series:

A Critical Assessment of Microfinance

Sector Reform in Public Health, Education, and Urban Services Evidence from Kabul and Herat

Afghanistan’s Power Sector: Pipedreams or Workable Solutions?

Working Paper Series:

Pilot Assessment of the Situation of Casual Laborers

Research Areas

Research at APPRO is focused on the inter-related streams of Aid Effectiveness; Social, Economic, Civil, and Political Rights; Political Economy; Governance; and Natural Resource and Environmental Management.

Aid Effectiveness

This stream aims to inform the government, civil society, and the international development community about successes and pitfalls of aid through a systemic examination of the flows, processes, and outputs of the “aid system”. As aid has been and is likely to remain one of the major income streams for Afghanistan, APPRO focuses on specific sectors of the Afghan socio-economy to assess performance against formal policy objectives aimed at transforming these sectors in efforts to facilitate the emergence of a sustainable socio-political system in Afghanistan.

Social, Economic, Civil, and Political Rights

This stream examines socio-economic, civil and political issues from a human rights perspective. Afghanistan has signed a number of international conventions promoting social and economic, civil and political rights. APPRO traces government's progress through its actions and policies to meet its commitments to uphold social, economic, civil and political rights. APPRO also documents and assesses the role of civil society and the international community in maintaining these rights.

Political Economy

This stream explores the organization of economic activity in rural and urban settings in Afghanistan at the macro-, meso- and micro-scales of analysis. APPRO views the Afghan political economy as a product of the interaction between various economic actors with vested interests constrained or enabled by different factors. Effecting change in the political economy thus requires in-depth understanding of the physical and material conditions, the institutions of governance, and the policy decisions.

Governance

This stream examines the dynamics of societal and organizational transformation toward a more desirable or sustainable mode of governance, paying particular attention to the formal and informal institutions of governance. Emphasis is placed on the linkage between governance and its institutions and the trade-offs that need to be made between social, economic, environmental, and political considerations and priorities.

Natural Resource and Environmental Management

This stream focuses on how sustainability of resource management can be increased through adopting a mix of traditional and modern approaches to resource extraction and use. The scale of analysis ranges from organizational (e.g., enterprise production) to societal (e.g., urban living). At all scales of analysis a lifecycle approach is adopted to map and analyze processes to establish where efficiencies can be incorporated into the system so as to increase equity in resource use and eliminate or minimize adverse environmental impacts.

APPRO prioritizes research projects that draw on its existing pool of expertise but also considers projects that require contracting national and international consultants and institutions to supplement APPRO's collective capacity for meeting research objectives.