The last leg is a different operation
Moving a consignment from Kabul to Kandahar, Herat or Mazar-e-Sharif is a mature service with predictable costs. What happens after that bears little resemblance to it. The vehicle that runs the highway is often the wrong vehicle for the district road; the driver who knows the corridor may not know the turning; and the load that travelled as one consignment usually has to be broken into several before it can continue.
Planning that treats the whole journey as a single line item therefore under-costs the part most likely to slip. It is more accurate to model two legs — trunk movement to a regional consolidation point, covered in the road transport planning guide, then distribution from there — and to hold contingency against the second rather than spreading it across both.
Access windows are narrower than the map suggests
Road distance is a poor predictor of delivery time once the route leaves the highway network. Seasonal closure, river crossings, unsurfaced sections and load limits all compress the window in which a delivery can realistically be made, and the window differs between neighbouring districts served from the same provincial capital.
The practical planning unit is therefore the access window rather than the distance: when can this district be reached, by what class of vehicle, carrying what weight. That question has a local answer, and it changes through the year. It is the reason regional coordinators are based in the zone they cover rather than dispatched from the capital — the information that decides a schedule is held by people who have driven the route recently, and it does not survive being written down in advance.
Where a programme has several remote destinations, sequencing them by access window rather than by convenience often recovers more time than any transport arrangement. Districts that close first should be served first, even where they are not the largest caseload. Winter is the sharpest form of the problem, and the winter pre-positioning guide covers it in detail.
Plan the handover, not just the transport
A distribution that arrives on the agreed day and cannot be handed over has still failed. The handover needs a location that can receive the volume, a counterpart present with authority to sign, an agreed identity-verification method where the recipients are individuals, and enough time in the day for the process to actually complete.
That last point is routinely underestimated. Verification and acknowledgement for several hundred recipients is not an activity that fits into the end of a travel day, and compressing it is exactly what produces incomplete records. Where distribution volume is high, the realistic plan schedules the handover as its own day with its own staffing.
Named counterpart
Someone with authority to receive and sign, confirmed before departure rather than located on arrival.
Receiving capacity
Space and labour at the destination to offload the volume being sent, including in poor weather.
Verification method
Agreed in advance with the programme team, including what happens when a listed recipient does not appear.
Evidence captured on the day
Delivery notes, distribution records and photographs completed at handover, not reconstructed later.
Exception route
A named contact and a decision rule for shortfalls, damage or a recipient list that does not match the ground.
What should proof of delivery contain?
Proof of delivery is not one document but a set that ties the goods that left the warehouse to the people who received them. Each part should be completed and signed at the point it describes; a file assembled afterwards from memory and photographs is where audit findings come from.
Waybill
The consignment as it left: quantities, vehicle, driver and destination, signed at dispatch.
Delivery note or goods received note
Signed by the named receiver at the destination, with any shortfall or damage written on the document.
Distribution list with acknowledgements
Each recipient's acknowledgement, signed or thumb-printed, against the approved list.
Dated photographs
Of the delivery and the distribution, where the programme's protocol allows them.
Reconciliation
Quantities dispatched, received and distributed, with every difference explained.
Local teams are the mechanism, not the marketing
Field access in Afghanistan is largely a question of standing relationships: with district authorities, community representatives, transporters and warehouse keepers. Those relationships are held by individuals in the region, and they take years to build. A supplier who mobilises staff from Kabul for a specific assignment is renting a network rather than operating one, and the difference shows in the exceptions rather than in the routine deliveries.
Zhikal runs five regional coordination zones, coordinated from Kabul, Jalalabad, Mazar-e-Sharif, Kandahar and Herat, each with a designated coordinator reporting to Kabul, and a field network reaching more than 250 districts. On a single assignment, a rental fleet was deployed and coordinated across all 34 provinces for more than seven months in support of an education-supply survey covering 33 provincial warehouses, 354 district warehouses and 4,537 school stocks. Coverage at that scale is a staffing structure, not a claim; the coverage page shows how the zones divide the country.
What to ask a logistics provider before awarding
Most capability statements answer the same questions. The ones that separate providers are narrower and harder to answer in general terms.
Who covers this district, and where are they based?
A name and a location, rather than an assurance of nationwide coverage.
When was your last delivery in this area?
Recent, specific movement matters more than a long portfolio elsewhere.
What is the access window for this destination?
A provider operating in the zone will answer in months and vehicle classes; one that is not will answer in kilometres.
How is a shortfall handled at handover?
The decision rule and the escalation contact should already exist, not be invented on the day.
What does the delivery file contain?
The document set should be nameable before the contract starts.
Zhikal delivers the last leg as part of its road freight service and, for relief items handed over to recipients, its NFI, hygiene-kit and food distribution service; each page lists what to send for a quotation.
Sources
- 2.3 Afghanistan Road Network (opens in a new tab)
Logistics Cluster, Logistics Capacity Assessment. Road conditions by region, including roads that lose access in winter or take only light trucks.
External sources are cited for the facts they report and were checked when this guide was last updated. Citing them implies no relationship with, or endorsement by, their publishers.