One of the significant challenges faced by the Ministry of Education (MoE) over the past 17 years was a lack of standard payroll procedures. Without standard procedures in place, employees and teacher had to deal with varying procedures across provinces and they did not have clear information about their benefits, including leave entitlements, overtime, taxation, and other allowances. In addition, ambiguous rules and procedures resulted in the MoE payroll and finance staff encountering glitches that prevented them from properly processing the payroll.

To address these challenges, USAID developed new standard operating procedures (SOPs) for payroll, accompanied by a toolkit of payroll processing forms and templates, and conducted training for more than 200 MoE finance department staff.

USAID continues to support the MoE to improve its transparency and accountability by providing on-the-job training to MoE staff and teachers on the effective implementation of the payroll SOPs at provincial, district and school levels.

“Before the implementation of the payroll SOPs, calculation of overtime, tax and retirement was not according to the law and regulations. By implementing the new SOPs, these issues were resolved, and our provincial payroll offices use a uniformed procedure to process the payroll,” said Mr. Ahmad Salim Habibi, MOE Payroll General Manager.

This project supports the Afghan MoE to achieve the goals of its third National Education Strategic Plan 2017-2021 by helping build its capacity and improve its systems to deliver high quality education services to the Afghan people.