Context:
Afghanistan’s administrative boundaries have seen lots of changes within the past fifty-odd years! Previously, Afghanistan was divided into 29 Provinces, which were further subdivided into 325 districts. Between the period of 1979 and 1982 a shuffling occurred in both the Provinces and the Districts, which resulted in 32 Provinces and 329 Districts. This structure is currently the standard used for mapping by AIMS and majority of organization operating in Afghanistan. and will be the basis of the coding scheme elaborated on in this document. Again in June 2004, the president’s office announced a re-distribution and rearrangement of administrative units resulting in 34 provinces and 397 districts in the country! The government has however not yet completed the delineation of boundaries to facilitate mapping on this new model. It is however being adopted as a standard for the management of databases with geographic elements. Given the dynamic situation in Afghanistan it is highly likely that administrative boundaries will shift in the future. Thus, the coding system herein described has been devised so as to allow for future aggregation or disaggregating at both administrative levels (province & district) as well as facilitate settlements additions. The hope is that this standard coding system will be used widely to facilitate the sharing of databases as well as enhanced geographic mapping through geo-code standardization.

County- 2 Alphabetic Digits, Administrative international boundary of the country (A.K.A. Admin.1).
Province- 2 Numeric Digits, First level administrative boundary subdivisions (A.K.A. Admin.2).
District- 2 Numeric Digits, Second level, administrative boundary subdivided from Province (A.K.A. Admin. 3).
Village- 5 Numeric Digits, Unique number assigned to each village.
(Country, Province and District levels represent geographic regions and Village data are point locations thus the term GeoCode is used in place of P-Code, which implies "place code" or point locations only)