NAC’s approach to cost efficiency
For NAC, cost efficiency is part of our broader approach to sustainability. We practice this in many different ways. For example, our approach to community contracting ensures that labour on programmes and projects – such as the building of agriculture infrastructure like canals and check dams – comes from within the communities where we work. This is both a cost efficiency measure, as it avoids the added costs of importing outside labour into communities, but also builds sustainability through providing local employment opportunities and promoting local engagement and ownership. In a similar vein, as much as possible, we source local materials and other resources from within the regions and communities where we work.
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"For NAC, cost efficiency is part of sustainability – by employing local staff, sourcing local materials, and keeping costs in Norway low, we ensure more funding reaches the Afghan people."
As another example of cost efficiency, more than 98 percent of our staff are Afghan, which reduces the costs of employing expatriate workers and is ultimately more sustainable as it builds national capacity. By maintaining a relatively small presence in Norway, the costs are kept to a minimum and we can direct the bulk of our funding to Afghanistan where it is most needed and goes the furthest towards supporting the Afghan people. Also, in the spirit of being a solidarity organization, NAC disagrees, in principle, with the payment of high consultancy rates for external experts. Although we do engage technical support from Norwegian and other experts who live outside of Afghanistan, we do this in the spirit of solidarity, and so such support is either voluntary, or pays a minimum salary recovery.
Finally, NAC’s efforts to streamline the overall structure of the organization and our more recent utilisation of technology – such as Microsoft Teams – help us to be efficient in our communications and in our work – for example, through more seamless collaboration on monitoring and evaluation and writing tasks – which improves our overall effectiveness and efficiency and ultimately reduces costs.
