by severe drought and two decades of conflict. The president of the World Bank estimates the economic rate of return on the NSP to be almost 20 percent (Zoellick, 2008). The NSP is funded by the International Development Association at the World Bank and the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund. Implemented by the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development (MRRD) and funded by the World Bank, the UK Department for International Development (DFID), the Danish International Development and Assistance Agency (DANIDA), the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the NSP is the Afghan government's flagship programme. Acting as the oversight consultants and responsible for strengthening local capacity and programme management at the ministry were the consulting firms GIZ and DAI. Implementing the NSP NGOs act as facilitating partners contracted by the MRRD to initiate the NSP and provide technical and capacity building support to the communities. The MRRD has developed an operational manual and facilitating partners that are contracted utilize it for community implementation. The facilitating partners serve many different roles in NSP implementations including training social community organizers tasked with educating the community about NSP, engaging community facilitators, providing technical assistance in designing and building infrastructure, providing election experts to implement CDC elections and assisting with the monitoring and evaluation of projects. An NSP project cycle for a community is broken down into 5 steps and usually takes 2 years to complete. First the NSP facilitating partner is assigned to the province by contracting through the MRRD. The facilitating partner then contacts the community to inform them of the NSP and commence the community mobilization process. In the second step, the facilitating partner is responsible for initiating a fair and transparent election process to elect members of the locally governing community development council (CDC). The CDCs are elected through a process of identifying the eligible voters in a community, creating a cluster of approximately 25 families and ensuring at least 80% of the cluster votes for representatives. The elected CDC members then decide on the CDC president, deputy, secretary and treasurer. Thirdly, the newly elected CDCs consult directly with members of the community to reach a consensus list of subproject ideas. This list called the community development plan (CDP) comprises projects which can be carried out with funds from the NSP and independent of outside support. The subprojects which require NSP funding are