THE AGA KHAN RURAL SUPPORT PROGRAMME
By Shabnam S. Lutafali, PhD (Notre Dame) — specialist in Women in Development and online faculty at Grand Canyon University, Arizona
Genesis
In the changing world of the mid-1950s, upon his accession as Aga Khan IV in 1957 the young Harvard-educated Imam of the Ismaili Muslims with a diverse global community took a year out from his studies to visit his various communities and to reflect upon what was needed to improve the quality of their lives and the lives of those among whom they lived. In the case of the Northern Areas of Pakistan, the terrain was inaccessible and the community there still lay outside the culture of national development. However, the Jubilees of Aga Khan III had given rise to schools for girls and medical centres for their basic health. It remained for Aga Khan IV to bring these communities into modern times. In this process Aga Khan IV had to embrace the culture of the area and work within the existing governmental and social developmental frameworks, as well as instituting new programmes that would meet the evolving needs of these isolated communities.
With the establishment of the Aga Khan Foundation, Geneva, in 1967, Aga Khan IV and a group of hand-picked global development specialists made a survey of social development programmes in South Asia and alighted upon a young Pakistani civil servant originally from Moradabad (India) who was on deputation from the government of Pakistan working with UNICEF in Sri Lanka. He had done some creative work under his mentor, Akhtar Hameed Khan (1914–1999), a world-renowned visionary in this area of development. This young man, Shoaib Sultan Khan, had completed some projects under the aegis of UNICEF and was brought to the notice of Aga Khan IV, who had decided to set up a rural development programme in part of the Bam –i- Dunya (Roof of the World), i.e. the Northern Areas of Pakistan. This programme was going to be transformative to the extent that it would be responsive to the needs of the people as they themselves visualized those needs. It would be flexible, adaptive, accountable and people-centred, and would give agency to the people for their own transformation. This was the ideal opportunity for Shoaib Sultan Khan to whom Aga Khan IV gave full operating freedom within the ethical principles of Islamic social governance that included accountability, inclusivity, a consultative process and gender equity. According to Masood-Ul-Mulk, Vice Chair of the Rural Support Network (RSPN)which is a collection of RSPs in Pakistan modelled on the AKRSP, the model that evolved blended beautifully with the environment and could be adapted to different environments in other parts of the world. For Masood “It gave agency to the people themselves, tapped their potential for self-help and collective action through instilling in them the notion of good governance at the very grass roots level of co-existence. It did this through encouraging them to jointly identify a common project which they chose themselves and which they also agreed to implement themselves. Consequently, they took full ownership of it”.
Early in his tenure with AKRSP, Shoaib Sultan Khan authored a book titled The Aga Khan Rural Support Programme: A Journey Through Grassroots Development, published by Oxford University Press. The book describes participatory development at a very practical level of operation involving people themselves in the decision-making process for the improvement of their lives.
While a doctoral student at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, I came across Shoaib Sultan Khan’s book and was so inspired by it, that I decided to change my thesis to ‘Development Strategies for Rural Women of Pakistan’. Shoaib Sultan Khan’s book was an inspiration and valuable source of information for my work. His commitment to gender equality inspired by Aga Khan IV’s ardent desire to promote women on an equal footing with men was decisive in changing the trajectory of my doctoral thesis.
AKRSP works in the fields of community mobilization, community infrastructure development. human resource development, enterprise development, social forestry and agriculture and livestock development. However, its major achievement is that it mobilized communities and provided a platform on which other AKDN institutions could work to improve education, health, social welfare, and economic opportunities, which they successfully did, serving all the people of the area regardless of class, gender or creed.
AKRSP thus is an institution that was decades ahead of its time in foreseeing the problems encountered by the world today. These include the problems of mass migration due to environmental degradation, and lack of opportunities in undeveloped and underdeveloped regions of the globe, as well as climate change induced by the exponential growth in the use of fossil fuels, to name but a few. In the Northern Areas of Pakistan, AKRSP has successfully enacted programmes that provide incentives for the local people (Ismailis and other communities) to exist peacefully with a rising standard of living, better schooling for children with opportunities for higher education, better health care facilities with world class maternity homes, and access to financial institutions to manage and grow wealth. AKRSP’s agrarian programmes enhance food production. Cottage industries are also promoted to generate income for families. Such incentives bind people to their native lands and deter them from migrating. The World Bank has reported AKRSP’s success in various fields of human endeavour including education, health, and wealth growth and management. AKRSP has successfully addressed the human issues that other institutions can emulate. As a model, AKRSP became globally respected and its principles were replicated in places such as Madhya Pradesh in India and in the high mountain valleys of Central Asia, most particularly in Tajikistan. Furthermore, AKRSP became the paradigm for other rural development programmes in Pakistan which Shoaib Sultan Khan went on to champion.
One of the most notable outcomes of the AKRSP is that young women from the Hunza district of Pakistan have begun to access further education opportunities through the Aga Khan University and other institutions of higher learning. Some of these young women now work in leading institutions in Pakistan, the Gulf area and in the Western World.
On a personal level, the journey I embarked on proved very valuable as I, myself, have been invited to lecture in Canada and in Japan on the whole notion of relevant rural support mechanisms — a field I continue to cherish today in the USA and in which I am deeply involved.
Shabnam S. Lutafali, PhD
Sugar Land, TX, USA
