Pakistan home

Rural Development

Education

Health

Microfinance & micro-insurance

Civil Society

Cultural Development

Other Countries

Rss

"The duty of responsible stewardship is very clear, a concept that can be equated to the notions of trust and trusteeship in today’s international legal terminology. The obligation to maintain the highest level of integrity in the management of donated resources, and of the institutions benefiting from them, is grounded in our faith."

HH the Aga Khan, Conference on Indigenous Philanthropy, Islamabad, Pakistan (21 October 2000)

Rural Development

A network of Rural Support Programmes now exists all over the country with the mandate to design and implement strategies for alleviation of rural poverty.Since 1982, the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme (AKRSP) in Pakistan has been working in a poor and rugged region located among four of the highest mountain ranges of the world, including the Karakorum, Himalayas, Hindukush and Pamirs. The region comprises six districts, five in the federally administered Northern Areas and one, Chitral, in the North West Frontier Province. The region shares borders with Afghanistan, Central Asian states, China to the north-east and India to the south. The population of 1.3 million lives in small villages widely dispersed throughout an area covering almost 90,000 square kilometers, an area the size of Ireland.

Before the Karakorum Highway was built in the late 1970s, the area was isolated from the rest of Pakistan. Most people lived from subsistence agriculture. When AKDN first came to the area, community mobilization, experimentation and innovation were hallmarks of the early programme. Later, when solutions were found for development challenges, these programmes scaled up with the help of national and international partners.

Among AKRSP’s many notable achievements has been a significant increase in incomes, the construction of hundreds of bridges, irrigation channels and other small infrastructure projects, the planting of tens of millions of trees and the reclamation of hundreds of acres of degraded land, and the mobilisation of 4,000 community organisations. These organisations, which have established patterns of local governance that are democratic, transparent and accountable to their members, manage savings of almost US$ eight million.

The overall goal of the organization is to improve the socio-economic conditions of the people of northern Pakistan by supporting:

• Institutional Development
• Participatory Infrastructure Development (Roads, Irrigation Projects and Microhydels, etc.)
• Natural Resource Management
• Women’s Development
• Rural Financial Intermediation
• Enterprise Development

The development model adopted by AKRSP has itself been widely replicated both within AKDN and outside it. A network of Rural Support Programmes now exists all over the country with the mandate to design and implement strategies for alleviation of rural poverty. In South Asia and other parts of the world programmes based on this model have been set up to promote grassroots development through involvement of local communities.

Since 1982, the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme in Pakistan has been working in a poor and rugged region located among four of the highest mountain ranges of the world.AKRSP has received a number of awards, including the 2005 Global Development Awards for Most Innovative Development Project. The award, which was announced at the Seventh Annual Global Development Conference held in St. Petersburg, Russia on 20 January 2006, was given to the development projects that were judged to have the greatest potential for benefiting the poor in developing countries. For more information, please see the Global Development Network website.

It also received an Ashden Award for Sustainable Energy, or "Green Oscar", for its programme of mini-hydels, or micro-hydroelectric plants, in the Northern Areas and Chitral. The Ashden Award cited the AKRSP for the sustainable and eco-friendly solution: "Unlike dams, which invariably damage the local eco-system, the micro-hydel technology used by AKRSP involves simply digging a narrow channel to divert water along a hillside and into a pipe, creating enough pressure to turn a turbine and so produce 20 -100kw of power." The impact in areas off the electricity grid has been significant. Over 180 micro-hydel units supplying electricity to 50 percent of the population of Chitral have been built. The projects are implemented, maintained and managed by the communities themselves.

A number of international donors have supported the programme for the last 20 years. These donors include the governments of Canada, UK, USA, Japan, Switzerland, Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan and European Commission.