The USAID Capacity Building Activity Project (CBA) promotes civil society engagement with local government and oversight of education services. In July 2019, USAID-trained community education monitors (CEMs) in Kandahar Province inspected the construction of the Ghazi Mohammad Akbar Khan High School and determined that the contractor was using substandard construction materials and that the construction laborers had not been hired from the local village, as required by the construction contract. The CEMs raised the issue with the district education department and the district governor, whom responded by initiating an independent review of the construction work and establishing a joint committee of community elders and education monitors to oversee and assess the school construction work.

The contractor has now addressed the construction faults and employed local labor. One Babai village elder remarked, “we didn’t know that Ghazi Mohammad Akbar Khan High School construction work was not following the agreement until the monitors identified the issue.”

CBA has trained 294 local shura (council) members in Kandahar province on education oversight and enabled them to monitoring education services and improve transparency and accountability in education service delivery as community education monitors (CEMs).