By Mahmood Hasan Khan
Professor Emeritus, Simon Fraser University, Canada
That man is Shoaib Sultan Khan (SSK). I have borrowed the title from his biography by Noel Cossins published in 2013.
I want readers to join me in celebrating SSK’s 90th birthday. Very few of us would reach this age; fewer who reach it would enjoy good health; and still fewer might dream of doing what SSK has achieved. Well, SSK is healthy and still doing work with his hat on. He leads a network of rural support programmes (RSPs) in Pakistan. Their aim is to help the rural poor improve their living conditions through a community-based self-help approach. This approach was pioneered by the late Akhter Hameed Khan (AHK) in East Pakistan (Bangladesh) in the 1960s. In fact, it was there that SSK—he was then working in the civil service—first met AHK and was inspired by his vision, dedication and practice at Comilla.
After the fall of Dhaka in 1971, SSK and AHK joined hands to duplicate the Comilla experience in Daudzai, a village near Peshawar. But they had to abandon the pilot project after only two or three years because of a well-orchestrated and vicious but baseless campaign against them. Both spent the rest of the decade outside Pakistan. As luck would have it, in 1982 the Aga Khan decided to launch the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme (AKRSP) in Gilgit initially to help improve the living conditions of the Ismaili community living in the villages. The Aga Khan was looking for a person to manage AKRSP. He invited SSK to lead the programme on the recommendation of AHK.
Towards the end of 1982, SSK with a small team of workers started dialogues with the villagers in open assembly to establish village organisations (VOs). The VOs were to be the vehicle to build local infrastructure; develop a credit programme for farm and non-farm enterprises based on community savings; train men and women in new skills; adopt new and profitable technologies; and get access to public and private goods and services that they needed but were unable to get without organised effort. The linchpin of this holistic programme was the village organisation (VO) and the support organisation (AKRSP) was its catalyst. One of the basic tenets of the programme was that it was not a substitute for but a partner of the public sector (government) agencies in the development process.
Initially it wasn’t too difficult to mobilise the Ismaili community since the programme was sponsored by its spiritual leader the Aga Khan. However, many leaders of the Sunni and Shia communities in the Gilgit-Baltistan (G-B) area were not receptive to the idea of a partnership with the AKRSP. In fact, some were quite hostile. It was an uphill task for SSK and his team to persuade these leaders to join them. Their best argument was that they should look at the benefits of the VOs in the Ismaili villages. SSK and his team overcame the resistance by the mid-1980s. By the end of the decade, AKRSP was actively involved with most rural communities in Gilgit, Baltistan and Chitral. And they had much to show about the benefits of forming VOs.
Now the question was: could the AKRSP model be used with equal success in alleviating rural poverty in other parts of Pakistan? In some respects, physical environment, economy and society, the northern areas were unlike any other region in the country. Many were sceptical, but SSK was confident that it would work with adaptations. In other words, the AKRSP model was worth scaling-up. He convinced the then Chief Minister of NWFP (Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa) to allow a similar programme to start in some districts of the province. That was in 1989. There are now eight rural support programmes in Pakistan: two of them in Sindh; one each in AJ&K, G-B, KP, Punjab, and Balochistan. There is also a large national rural support programme (NRSP) and a small programme in the Attock district. In the late 1990s, SSK also established the Rural Support Programme Network (RSPN) to coordinate the activities of RSPs and to influence the policies and practices of the national and international agencies to foster rural development through community organisations (COs). Thanks to the relentless efforts of SSK, RSPs have received grants (funds) from the provincial and federal governments and some international agencies.
The RSPs have evolved and expanded in terms of their activities and coverage. Their partnership with the rural communities in Pakistan includes social mobilisation (forming COs); community savings and small loans for enterprises; managerial and technical training of CO members; community schools for boys and girls; healthcare and hygiene for women and children; local infrastructure; health and life insurance; and partnership with the private and public agencies and institutions. Community organisations have formed the Local Support Organisations (LSOs) to take advantage of the economies of scale and to strengthen the power of rural communities to influence public sector (government) agencies in providing goods and services, e.g., physical infrastructure, healthcare, and education, that the communities need but cannot afford without the support of government agencies and private entities.
What have the RSPs achieved so far? Well, they are present in 4,681 rural Union Councils of 149 districts of Pakistan. They have helped 8.5 million rural households (with a population of 55 million) to organise into over 500, 000 COs with 8.8 million members, of which 56 percent are women. The CO members have saved Rs. 2.88 billion and the COs have accumulated Rs. 13.43 billion as community infrastructure fund. CO members have taken small loans worth Rs. 347 billion. Over 61 per cent of the borrowers are women and nearly two-thirds of the loan amount has been taken by them. Nearly 4 million CO members have been trained for managerial and technical skills. In healthcare services, 43,354 CO members—80 per cent of them are women—have been trained as community health workers. COs are running community schools for 93,907 children, of which 44 percent are girls. Finally, COs have completed 172,661 schemes for physical infrastructure worth Rs. 39.2 billion directly benefiting 6 million households.
SSK has been an outstanding leader of this movement. He has inspired and guided many thousands of young men and women working in RSPs. He has used every platform to advocate the cause of RSPs and every contact to influence public policy and receive resources for COs to expand and improve their activities. His interactions with the rural people through dialogues have induced them to organise and use their collective strength to improve their living conditions. And SSK has the humility to admit mistakes and the flexibility to adjust. He conveys this message unambiguously to managers and front-line workers in the RSPs. RSPs have a made a difference in the life of millions of the rural poor, men and women. Had there been no RSPs the change in their living conditions would have been far slower and less certain. SSK deserves to be proud of what he has achieved in the last 40 years. I wish him another healthy 90 years!