Since 2001, the Afghan population'saccess to basic services has greatly improved in nearly allsectors. School enrolment has increased sharply, with overeight million children currently enrolled in school, ofwhich 39 percent are girls. Current strategies for improvingsub-national service delivery focus on delegating greaterauthority to provincial and district administrations. Thisreport aims to identify administrative constraints in threekey sectors of public service delivery, education, healthand agricultural extension services. The analysis followsthe service delivery chain, from central to provincial,through district to community level, and is particularlyconcerned to examine service delivery in these three sectorsthrough the window of sub-national governance and itsrelations to the service delivery mandates of lineministries. The study provides the Government of Afghanistanwith recommendations on how to alleviate criticalconstraints to service delivery at sub-national levels on asustainable basis, in the context of an expected restrainedfiscal future. The report's main findings are based onqualitative research. The key findings are based on existingliterature and reports as well as field visits to 5provinces and 10 districts and qualitative analyses of over171 key-informant interviews on different levels of servicedelivery administration, 68 in-depth interviews withcommunity leaders, and a community household survey in 20communities spread over 5 provinces and 55 servicefacilities (for example, schools and clinics) were assessed.The report is split into six sections: section one givesexecutive summary; section two provides a brief introductionto the study objectives and clarifies some key definitions;section three outlines the methods used to perform theanalysis; sections four, five, and six provide in-depthdiscussions of education, health, and agriculture extensionrespectively; and section seven provides recommendations andconcludes. The over-arching governance structures andfurther methodological details are given in appendix one.All references and research tools are presented in annexes.