Services under Program and Project Office for Results Tracking Phase II (SUPPORT-II) First Quarterly Report, Option Year 3

under the terms of USAID Contract No. AID-306-C-12-00012. SUPPORT-II provides a host of services through USAID/Afghanistan's Office of Program and Project Development (OPPD) to improve the efficiency of activities, programs, and projects implemented by the Mission's Technical Offices. This first Quarterly Activity Report (QAR) under Option Year 3 (OY-3) covers the period July 5 - September 30, 2015. SUPPORT-II successfully accomplished the following activities for USAID Afghanistan's monitoring and evaluation (M&E) and monitoring and verification (M&V) goals and objectives. These activities include completing a Monitoring and Evaluation Plan for the Office of Economic Growth and Infrastructure's (OEGI) Power Transmission and Electrical Connectivity (PTEC) project, conducting assessments of OEGI's Turquoise Mountain Trust (TMT) and the Office of Agriculture's (OAG) Agriculture Credit Enhancement (ACE) project, and submitting the final report for the verification of textbooks distributed by the Ministry of Education (MOE) under the Basic Education, Literacy and Technical-Vocational Education and Training project. SUPPORT-II also began several new activities, including OAG's Agricultural Assessment and OEGI's mid-term performance evaluation of the Multi-Area Development - Global Alliance (MIAD-GDA) project, a Data Quality Assessment (DQA) of seven indicators for OAG's Capacity Building and Change Management Program-II (CBCMP-II) project, and OPPD's META evaluation of 35 previous projects. Additionally, SUPPORT-II monitored 140 Afghan Civic Education Program (ACEP) events for the Office of Democracy and Governance (ODG), 1 health-related workshop for the Office of Social Services, and 29 events organized by the Afghan Workforce Development Project (AWDP) for OEGI. Despite these accomplishments, SUPPORT-II continues to face challenges recruiting expat consultants willing to work in Afghanistan and conducting field monitoring and verification activities due to security incidents in Kabul and country-wide. Compliance with the Afghan government's request that the salaries of USAID implementing partners' Afghan staff be at parity with government wages is also anticipated to create contractual issues and result in a possible loss of qualified local staff. The project's activity implementation is summarized in a table, which will be revised once directions are received from the Contracting Officer Representative (COR) on specific tasks and deliverables. The tasks and deliverables include Performance Management Plan (PMP) and related activities, tracking results and collecting data quarterly, analyzing Mission's procedures for generating information for periodic reports, third-party monitoring, and evaluation of activities, programs, and projects.