Of contracts, mullahs, and the danger of the opposite sex - inafghanistan

inafghanistan is blogging in Afghanistan where he's recently arrived. He's working for USAID. Last spring he was here as visiting student and graduated from AU in May 04. Here's some insightful economics related observations from a recent post:

Ensuring a competitive bidding process, and then following up to make sure the work is done and done well, is extremely difficult in Afghanistan, considering that most contractors lack such commercial niceties as a bank account, or, say, an interest in reading or understanding formal contracts. Not to mention the difficulty of monitoring a construction project in a war-zone. So our work here is not just about ensuring that concrete gets poured, but also about increasing the skill and capacity of Afghani contractors to take on more and more sophisticated projects.
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The empowerment of women is a strand than runs through absolutely everything: bids for construction contractors are ranked, in part, by how many women the contracter can employ (on a good day, this is pushing 6%).

Very American.

By the way, inafghanistan shows excellent taste in his choice of blogspot/blogger (tm) template.