SCALING UP IN AGRICULTURE, RURAL DEVELOPMENT, AND NUTRITION
Aga Khan Development Network: Expanding Rural Support Programs in South Asia | HENRI SUTER, LEANNE SEDOWSKI, AND JOANNE TROTTER
Focus 19 • brIeF 13 • June 2012 T
he Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) focuses its efforts in rural development primarily in fragile high-mountain and
coastal areas with vulnerable and marginalized populations. The beneficiaries are often cut off from government service provision and living where market linkages are weak and access to technical innovations is limited. In these challenging environments, AKDN’s mission is to transform the quality of life for the populations with whom it works. This requires a multi-input approach, including interventions in education, health, financial services, livelihoods, infrastructure, and local governance—and agriculture. AKDN’s approach rests on the core belief that a sustained impact on quality of life can be achieved by empowering actors in the three domains of society: government, civil society, and the private sector. Such empowerment can ensure that they are active, informed, and capable of interacting appropriately to promote economic and social development. AKDN’s rural support programs (RSPs) were first initiated in
Pakistan in 1982, and subsequently they have been replicated across the country, reaching 4.1 million households in 110 districts through the Rural Support Programme Network. AKDN RSPs now operate in 12 countries in Asia, the Middle East, and Sub-Saharan Africa. They often work alongside other AKDN agencies with mandates in different sectors to achieve meaningful impact at scale. This brief focuses on experience in Asia, providing an overview of the RSP model, how it has been scaled up over 30 years to reach 5.7 million beneficiaries, and lessons learned.
Operational principles
RSPs are local institutions established as locally registered, nonprofit, civil society organizations. They are intended to enable local people to better identify, plan, resource, and manage their own development processes. RSPs operate within a defined geographic area and aim to catalyze social and economic development. The close linkage to communities enables them to remain responsive and relevant over the long term. RSPs eastablish elected village organizations (VOs) as an
entry point for program activities. VOs represent the community and oversee the articulation of a village development plan (VDP). The VDP, which is created through a participatory planning process facilitated by the RSP, lays out a community’s vision for improving its quality of life. Once it is drafted, often using visual plans so illiterate community members can participate fully, RSP staff members challenge communities to identify which activities can be undertaken with their own resources and which require external technical, financial, or human resources. The RSP role is then to connect VOs to the support needed to implement the plan, including making connections with government, the private sector, nongovernmental organization providers, or specialized AKDN agencies. In this way, VOs become a platform for community engagement with service providers.
VOs are provided with significant institutional strengthening
support. This encompasses gender awareness, participatory monitoring and evaluation, project management, and linkage building in hopes that in time VOs can become self-sustaining local governance institutions. VOs regularly self-assess their institutional maturity and social accountability and can access additional, targeted training as needed. This investment in VOs as institutions of participatory governance is a defining characteristic of RSPs’ work and is essential to the sustainability of activities and to the scaling up and replication of the approach. RSPs form apex institutions to enable program growth
and replication. Operating at a community level in a large, sparsely populated geographic area is very resource intensive. As VOs mature, the RSPs form apex organizations, constituted of VO members, at the district or subdistrict level. Through apex organizations, VOs share aggregated plans with higher-level government institutions and formulate development projects that benefit communities. This aggregation of demand strengthens VOs’ voices with government or private sector service providers and creates a vertically integrated network of civil society partners with whom RSP staff members and other actors can work. Women play a crucial role in the creation and implementation
of VDPs. Because of cultural constraints, it is sometimes necessary for women to form separate VOs that are linked to male-led VOs, often through a husband and wife team. Over time, the RSPs establish significant trust with communities and develop sufficient access to address issues of specific interest to women through income-generating activities, financial services, and social development projects. For example, RSPs have promoted women- managed, community-based savings groups to reduce vulnerability to shocks.
Pathways for scaling up
Horizontal scale up takes place as RSPs form VOs systematically within a region of a country. The RSPs pilot, assess, and refine new ideas, approaches, or technologies and then roll them out to new VOs. For example, low-cost drip irrigation was trialed extensively in India, before roll-out across the program area. The proven technology has now been adopted by private enterprises that provide equipment, financing, and maintenance. For the scaling up to be effective, interventions and approaches are layered into local governance structures that promote equitable development at the community level and become part of an ecosystem supporting multisector development. Vertical scale up takes place as RSPs focus on apex institutions
rather than on individual community-level projects. As RSPs mature, most of the investment is in building the capacity of local service providers such as government departments, agricultural research facilities, sector-specific civil society organizations (for example, pasture management associations), or private enterprises. Through engagement at this level, RSPs help service providers and
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