Results: LCEP’s Progress Monitoring Approach

LCEP is built on the foundation laid by the Afghan National Solidarity Program (NSP). LCEP grew from the prescient recognition that the NSP’s beginning, excellent though it was, was not enough to sustain lasting change. Perhaps the most salient lesson learned from the NSP experience is that community development takes time, because participants need varied yet regular opportunities to practice and implement what they learn.1

For this reason, LCEP was designed to offer community development opportunities that addressed multiple community needs in a highly integrated manner, and to stay with communities long enough for emerging skills to become well rooted in each community and become sustainable. LCEP is therefore best described as an integrated community development program having three main phases of activities:

  1. Those that lay groundwork for sustainable change (‘getting started’).
  2. Those that help sustainable change take root (‘moving along’).
  3. Those that help sustainable change bear fruit (‘showing results’).

As participants progress through the LCEP implementation cycle, they increase in their ability to autonomously sustain the activity or its outcomes. Therefore, activities or outcomes that are at a ‘getting started’ phase are less likely to be sustained after LCEP phase-down than those at a ‘moving along’ or ‘showing results’ phase.

LCEP’s goal is to get as many communities and participants as possible well into the ‘moving along’ phase or into the ‘showing results’ phase.

Classification of the sustainability potential of a given activity is by no means an exact science. It is based on direct EDC and UN Habitat experience in implementing community development projects in Afghanistan and elsewhere, as well as on collective development experience available through research.

To see the Literacy Component laid out by progress phases, click here.

To see the Governance Component laid out by progress phases, click here.

To see the Economic Empowerment Component laid out by progress phases, click here.

To see the Women’s Teacher Training Institute laid out by progress phases, click here.

  1. Based on conclusions made by the Post War Reconstruction & Development Unit of the York University document on “The Mid-Term Evaluation of the Afghanistan National Solidarity Program”.