Assessing Youth Drug Use in Afghanistan: work to deliver pilot surveys in gathers pace
Kabul, Afghanistan - 26 January 2016
UNODC held a technical meeting of the Steering Committee established to oversee development and roll-out of pilot surveys on youth drug use in Afghanistan at the Deputy Ministry of Youth Affairs in Kabul.
This meeting is part of a major undertaking by Sub-Programm 4 "Trends and Impacts" of the Regional Programme for Afghanistan and Neighbouring Countries (RP) and the Survey and Statistics Section of UNODC HQ in Vienna to support surveys of drug use by youths in Member States in West and Central Asia
The project on pilot surveys on youth drug use is designed to not only allow for the first ever trend analysis on youth drug use in the region to inform development of policy interventions and responses but also increase national capacities to design and implement such surveys - on both pilot and national basis.
The pilot survey for Afghanistan is being led by UNODC in conjunction with Ministries of Counter Narcotics, Public Health, and Deputy Youth Affairs, UNICEF and UNFPA.
The Steering Committee meeting was chaired by Mr. Senyo Agbohlah, Programme Coordinator of Sub-Programme 4 and resulted in substantial progress being made to finalize questionnaires for the in and out of school pilots, select rural and urban settings for the pilots, as well as agreement on the timeline for project implementation.
It is planned that interviews of in and out of school youth will take place from late April till June with data collation, cleaning, analysis and report writing to take place in the summer.
Similar technical meetings and planning sessions will take place in Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Iran, and Tajikistan in the coming months to inform country-specific reports which then form the basis of a regional report.
The RP is thankful for the generous support of the European Union, and Governments of Denmark and Italy, without which the pilot youth drug use survey project would not be possible.