Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit

It aims to provide a firm basis for policy and practice in the country's rapidly changing environment by conducting in-depth, on-the-ground research.

In 2000 the Strategic Monitoring Unit (SMU) was established in Islamabad by the Afghan Support Group,[1][2][3] to improve emergency response by ensuring that lessons learned from similar situations around the world were analysed and disseminated [1](at that time Afghanistan was largely under Taliban rule).

Current research themes are: governance, gender, livelihoods and human security, natural resource management, political economy and markets.

It also seek to facilitate the achievement of rural livelihood security and stability in Afghanistan by exploring the dynamics of the opium economy in the 2010-11 growing season and beyond.

Since the formation of the unit, statistical publications, NGO reports, policy papers and similar materials have been accumulated and indexed in the AREUO Library on-line bibliographic database (built using Greenstone open source software).