KABUL (SW): The Afghan Ministry of Finance and the World Bank, as the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF) Administrator, signed two grant agreements totaling $ 128 million for power and agriculture sectors.
According to the MoF, $ 45 million additional grant would be provided to the ongoing On Farm Water Management Project (OFWMP). OFWMP will continue to support efforts to improve agricultural productivity by enhancing the efficiency of water use through the rehabilitation of small-scale irrigation schemes, and helping farmers adopt new agricultural practices, it noted.
$ 83 million grant would finance the Naghlu Hydropower Rehabilitation Project (NHRP). NHRP aims to improve dam safety and to increase the supply of electricity at the Naghlu Hydropower Plant, which will help enhance the reliability of the electric power system and benefit both households and industries, thereby stimulating economic development and growth, it said.
“Both these projects outline the government’s position to improve on water usage in Afghanistan and utilize them for the economic and social development of the Afghan people,” said Eklil Hakimi, Finance Minister.
The Naghlu Hydropower Rehabilitation Project will give a much needed boost to the energy sector in Afghanistan, which has suffered serious negligence as a result of decades of devastating civil war and insurgency.
In June 2015, Afghanistan's access to electricity rate was estimated at about 25–30 percent.
Electricity is available mainly in the urban areas and along a few transmission corridors.
Hydropower provides 94.6 percent of domestically generated electricity with an installed capacity of 254 MW. In mid-2015, there were 12 hydropower plants in Afghanistan, not counting the over 5,000 off-grid micro-hydropower plants constructed under the National Solidarity Program (NSP).
The two largest among those are the Naghlu Hydropower Plant at 94 megawatt installed capacity and Mahipar Hydropower Plant at 66 megawatt installed capacity. The project will focus on the Naghlu Hydropower Plant, which is of strategic importance to Afghanistan's power generation portfolio as it provides more than half of Kabul's electricity.
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