agency defence

Aid agencies say donors are simply carrying out pre-approved programmes with no intention of interference.

"We don't want to be competing with the government in the rural areas. In all of our programmes ,even if our funding hasn't gone through government, 100 percent of our activities are approved by the [national] government," DFID's O'Neill told IRIN.

He explained that existing local government bodies like the District Development Committees (DDC) and Village Development Committees (VDC) have limited capacity and that this reality is unlikely to change soon.

"I was in Humla and Jumla (remote hill villages in the country's northwest) where the [local] government has very limited capacity. In these remote places where the situation is complex and [national] government has no presence, why cannot an external partner deliver services onfrom the third survey of the school-based surveillance system entitled \"Childhood and Adolescence Surveillance and PreventIon of Adult Non-communicable Disease\" (CASPIAN), which was conducted in 2009 and 2010. Descriptions of the method and operation of the survey have been described before \[[@B21]\]. The study was approved by the ethical committee and other relevant national regulatory organizations.

The present study was performed among 5,625 students aged 10-18 years. Data on some variables were missing in some students; therefore, students with available data were included in the statistical analysis. Students were selected via multistage random cluster sampling method from urban and rural areas of 27 provinces in Iran. Eligible schools in our study were stratified according to the information bank of the Ministry of Health and Medical Education, and they were