Communities fight poverty in the north

In Pakistan’s far north, one of the country’s most remote and mountainous areas, village people have traditionally struggled to survive, faced with a dependency on agriculture, extreme weather conditions and little rainfall. Today poverty remains a challenge, but villagers themselves have begun to bridge the gap with the rest of the country - they’re building irrigation channels, linking roads to connect villages and generating their own electricity. The efforts have largely been driven by the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme, which has been active in Pakistan’s Northern Areas and Chitral since 1982. The Programme helps local people improve and sustain the quality of their lives by involving communities in all aspects of development activity in their villages and valleys. This approach has brought households together to tackle projects that could not be attempted individually but have been crucial in uplifting the entire community. The impact has been substantial. During the 1990s when Pakistan was in the midst of an economic slump, per capita income in Chitral and the Northern Areas was on the increase. Today progress continues to be made. The most prominent examples are hundreds of irrigation channels which divert water from snow covered mountains, and feed them to surrounding farmland. Almost 100 percent of the irrigation projects to date have been successfully maintained by the communities which provide free or subsidised labour and local materials. AKRSP provides financial and technical assistance and basic training for unskilled labour. “The communities have to provide up to half of the total cost of the project,” Safdar Parvez, progamme manager for the AKRSP, told IRIN. This is fundamental in building ownership. Once it has been implemented, the responsibility for maintaining the irrigation channels rests with the communities, the local people.” The simple act of the communities coming together builds a social infrastructure that previously did not exist. “The social impact is instrumental in building cohesion in society, people working together to achieve common goals,” he said. By the end of 1998, almost 50,000 acres of new land and 60,000 acres of existing land in the Northern Areas and Chitral had come under cultivation through the production of irrigation channels. With the newly irrigated soil not immediately fertile enough to grow cash or food crops, the land is planted in forestry. This has not only had an environmental impact by helping to combat erosion, but it has mitigated the effects of fuel and energy shortages and resulted in direct savings on purchased fuel for cooking and heating purposes. Women have directly benefited through a reduction in their workload - it has eased the burden of collecting fuel-wood from the distant and dwindling natural forest areas. “What we try and do is reduce the drudgery. Women don’t have to walk six hours to fetch water anymore and they don’t have to travel huge distances to collect firewood,” Parvez said. Once soil fertility has improved, the AKRSP works with the villagers to plant cash and food crops such as wheat, fruit and vegetables. One of the success stories in recent years - a direct result of the land development project - was the creation of a niche market for potatoes. The soil fertility and topography in the region after irrigation was found to be prime for growing potatoes. Today they are produced in abundance and sold to markets throughout Pakistan. The AKRSP ensures that each household in the community benefits equally - regardless of their financial circumstances. “The poor and the better-off households get equal share of any new land that comes under cultivation,” Parvez said. Economic improvement has led to better social conditions for the local people. Both physical and financial access to education and health facilities has increased for men and for women. Mainstreaming women’s activities through the existence of women’s organisations has led to their enhanced roles in decision-making on major household issues. Community organisations have promoted social harmony and democracy and resolved village disputes. Link roads have enabled the transport of agricultural goods and given villagers better access to social services. Micro-hydro electricity has provided much needed power which has resulted in meeting the huge power gaps in the area. A number of small infrastructure schemes designed specifically to benefit women have been initiated, including drinking water supply schemes. These projects, while providing clean water at source inside villages, have cut the workload of women by saving them long hours trekking to fetch water. Seed production in Chitral has also been the target of the AKRSP. Wheat in Chitral, as in the rest of Northern Pakistan, has been the major cereal crop. Together with the Agriculture Development Authority, the Programme has been providing improved wheat seeds to farmers every year to enable them to grow high yielding wheat. However as well as being more expensive, improved seeds have been more susceptible to disease than locally produced seed. The AKRSP set about motivating progressive farmers to move toward seed production through multiplying seed made available from external agencies. Shah Alam Taj, a local farmer, using one bag of seed was able to produce 12 bags of high quality seed and earned 12,000 rupees from the sale of the surplus. Despite these positive steps, challenges still remain. Infrastructure bottlenecks, such as road access, continue to hamper the efforts being made by the AKRSP and NGOs working in the region. “Production is not the real problem,” Parvez said. “We don’t have adequate infrastructure, and access to many areas is very limited. We are constantly urging the government for these things.”