An innovative approach

IN this final article on the work being done by the National Commission on Human Development to meet the basic needs of the Pakistani masses, I will first summarise the main points I made in the two preceding columns. In preparing the ground for this discussion, I made four observations.

One, all previous attempts to bring primary education and basic health care to the people relied on a top-down approach. The World Bank’s Social Action Programme was the most ambitious attempt made in this context in the past. It failed in large part because it dictated change rather than encouraged it to happen. It saw the intended beneficiaries as passive recipients of the government’s favours and it used inefficient and often corrupt government departments to utilise the resources provided by the donor community.

Two, by creating an elaborate system of local government, the regime of General Pervez Musharraf has given voice to the people. They can raise it to gain access to the services the government should provide. Experience from around the globe and Pakistan’s own experiment with the development of local government suggest that decentralisation works only when it is allowed to take root slowly. Architects of such systems must show patience and be prepared to learn from both successes and mistakes. They should be ready to face resistance from those whose power will erode once decentralisation takes hold.

Three, for a system to succeed it must be able not only to provide voice to the people, that voice must also be heard. This will only happen if local government institutions develop the capacity to use for people’s social and economic betterment the resources that national and provincial systems are prepared to provide. However, the task of building capacity at the local level is difficult, especially when the people who are being reached are largely illiterate. They will respond to the attempts directed at capacity-building when it becomes clear that such efforts are being made by those who are genuinely motivated to bring about change.

Four, it is fortunate that the capacity building effort that is central to the work of the National Commission for Human Development is being led by an individual — Dr Nasim Ashraf — who is not only committed and charismatic but has also developed into an art what economists call “learning from doing.”

I will now turn to the goals and achievements of the NCHD, starting first with the focus on capacity-building. A great deal that went wrong with the previous efforts directed at human development was the absence of focus on creating institutions that could identify people’s aspirations and then take decisions about using available resources towards meeting them. This could only happen if institution-building became the focus of attention. Institution building means many things in the context of community development. It implies closing the “capacity gap” that exists between local government institutions and governments at higher levels.

The presence of this gap means that the officials working at higher levels — in the provincial and national governments — develop a paternalistic approach. People are to be told “what to do” before they are taught “how to do.” This is essentially what is meant by pursuing a top down approach. For development to be effective communities must first identify what their priority needs are, before asking for additional resources to achieve these. There is enough experience from around the world to show that backward communities that are asked to identify priorities for development choose health and education. There is also evidence that communities don’t necessarily discriminate against girls if the society at large is more accommodating. Once they have chosen their priorities they must learn how to apply resources for implementing them.

Communities that are the target of social and economic development have to learn how to use money — in short to “budget” the available resources. This is one of the priority programmes of the commission. Over the last couple of years, it has trained 500 district education and health executive officers — to plan and budget. In addition, over 400 elected zila and tehsil level representatives, including women, have received training. Not only has this effort resulted in the more judicious use of available resources, it has also made people aware of what economists and accountants call “cost-benefit” analysis. Not surprisingly, the areas that were targeted for this type of work have performed much better in terms of achieving high levels of social and human development.

With a better trained staff and better trained and informed representatives of the people, the work done by the NHCD demonstrates that the time needed to achieve ambitious goals can be considerably reduced. Net enrolment rates have not improved much in Pakistan, according to the Medium Term Development Framework published last year by the Planning Commission; they have reached only 54 per cent of the school cohort.

The situation is very different — impressively so — in the areas in which the NHCD is concentrating its efforts. In the districts where the commission is working, net enrolment rates have increased from 54 to 85 per cent over a short period of time. Over 1.6 million children not attending schools were brought into the educational system with the help of a door-to-door campaign that persuaded parents that it made good economic sense to send their children, including girls, to school. It is important to underscore that the commission was operating within the established educational system; it was not setting up a parallel structure along with those already operating in the countryside.

In addition to enrolling more students in existing schools, the commission has also an indigenously developed literacy programme in which, after 180 hours of instruction, previously illiterate people can read fairly advanced texts, such as newspapers. I am told that when Cherie Blair, the wife of the British prime minister, visited Mansehra, a 58-year-old woman who was totally illiterate before joining the literacy programme was able to read and comprehend the headlines of an Urdu newspaper. “It was a great moment for all of us,” wrote Dr Nasim Ashraf in an e-mail to me.

The commission has started 20,000 literacy centres which have provided basic literacy to over half a million women in two years. There are plans to set up 50,000 centres a year over the next five years, which would bring literacy to six million people and increase the literacy rate by almost three percentage points a year. Coupled with the commission’s Universal Primary Education Project, which focuses on increasing school enrolment and reducing the dropout rate, the commission believes that it can have Pakistan achieve 85 per cent literacy by 2012, three years before the target date established by the UN’s millennium development goals.

The commission is also working in the area of basic health care. The programme launched by the NHCD aims to reduce infant, child and maternal mortality by using simple and well-known technologies such as oral rehydration, immunisation and pre- and post-natal care. Health workers are selected from within the targeted communities, trained and sent door-to-door to fulfil the health needs of the people. The focus is on prevention; one dollar used is prevention; it saves $18 that would need to be spent once the disease takes hold.

Finally, I should also mention an entirely new programme developed by the commission — the creation of a national volunteer corps. Thus far some 115,000 people have joined the corps; their effectiveness was vividly demonstrated during the relief efforts mounted by the government following the devastating earthquake of October 2005. This initiative was recognised by the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in his address to the General Assembly as well as at the International Conference on Volunteerism held in Islamabad in December 2004.

There is a reason why I have spent so much time and space to analyse two “micro” initiatives — the work underway by the Higher Education Commission and the National Commission for Human Development. For me, the successes already scored by these two commissions bring into sharp focus the absence of a well thought out strategy at the macro level.

This series of six articles — the first three on the effort aimed at promoting higher education, the last three on the work being done to improve capacity for development at the local level — had one underlying theme. They suggest that the Musharraf administration achieved some extraordinary successes at the micro level since it placed these efforts in a pair of very committed hands. The persons in charge were prepared to study the problem they were called upon to solve. Both the Higher Education Commission and the National Commission for Human Development began their work after the areas to be covered had been carefully studied by task forces. Unfortunately, this was not done at the macro-level — for defining a strategy for sustaining a high level of economic growth over a reasonably long period of time.

The task force that looked at higher education identified the poor quality of teaching as the most serious obstacle the country faced in equipping the people to become productive members of a growing economy. There was no point in committing additional public resources to higher education unless the quality of teachers — not just their number — was significantly improved.

Similarly, the task force that studied the problem posed by the low level of human development concluded that even if additional resources were made available for providing basic education and health care to the poor, not much would be achieved unless the capacity to use these resources was significantly improved.

The HEC is focusing on improving the quality of instruction in the country’s colleges and universities, not only on increasing the number of these institutions and their capacity to accommodate more students. The NCHD is making significant efforts to train both officials and people’s representatives at the local level — the bottom tier of the system of governance being developed by the Musharraf government.

I have no doubt that these two initiatives will produce several happy results. They will surely help the country move out of backwardness and proceed towards modernisation. Their impact will become visible slowly since human development takes place not by taking giant leaps but by small steps.

The steps are bound to hit many bumps on the way, some of them placed by those whose narrow interests are threatened by the progress being made. However, the concept behind the work of the Higher Education Commission and the National Commission for Human Development is well developed and based on careful analysis. Both commissions are pursuing big ideas. They need the help and support of all those who are interested in seeing Pakistan leave behind backwardness and break away from the pull of the forces that would like to see the country go back to the dark ages.

Kabul at centre of big-power tussle

NEARLY five years after the defeat of the Taliban regime, the government in Afghanistan is again being challenged by the Taliban and other nationalist groups. Afghanistan, where other foreign powers such as Britain and Russia, met with defeat and frustration in earlier centuries, is presenting a challenge to the US.

The latter, despite the support of the European Union and Nato, its partners in the bid to establish hegemony over the rugged but strategically located country, is faring no better.

Both military security and energy security shape the West’s plans in a part of the globe where China and Russia compete actively to have equal access to the dwindling reserves of non-renewable energy. The US is also animated by the concept of the “New American Century” for which it is cultivating Israel and India as its strategic partners.

This arouses a reaction in the Arab and Islamic countries, where most of the oil and gas resources are located. Pakistan, though not a large country in comparison to China, India and Russia, also has key security and economic interests to defend, and is also the country with the longest border with land-locked Afghanistan to which it provides the main outlet to the sea.

The US, in the concluding decade of the Cold War, had exploited Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan, to fight a proxy war against its rival termed as the “evil empire” by the late President Ronald Reagan. Mobilising the jihadist sentiment of the Islamic world, with Osama bin Laden commanding the Mujahideen assembled from all over the world, Washington inflicted such a defeat on Moscow that the Soviet Union not only conceded defeat, but later disintegrated.

Once the Soviet Union withdrew in 1989, the US appeared to lose interest and shifted its attention to regions of more substantial concern, such as the Middle East, where rich oil reserves and the security of Israel led the senior George Bush to station US forces in the Islamic heartland. There was little realisation that the thousands of Islamic militants, led by Osama bin Laden, who had been a close US ally for seven years, would find an isolated Afghanistan the ideal country for countering Washington’s plans to dominate the region.

Osama turned war-torn Afghanistan into his main base for his jihad to expel the American forces that had been stationed in the Arabian peninsula. He had a multinational force of militants that the Americans themselves had assembled in their resolve to avenge the defeat they had suffered in the previous round of the proxy war with the Soviet Union in Vietnam in 1975.

The decade of the 1990s saw the sufferings and misery of the Afghan people continue, as the great powers abandoned it and tribal and ethnic rivalries broke loose. The period saw hapless Afghans continuing to escape to Pakistan and Iran. Though these countries worked together for a while and arrived at the Peshawar and Islamabad accords to end the fighting among Mujahideen factions, differences developed as Iran drew closer to non-Pashtun factions led by the Persian-speaking Tajiks. Pakistan’s attitude was influenced by the large Pashtun population in the Frontier and Balochistan.

The civil war had the effect of destroying the Afghan cities, which had remained largely intact during the Soviet occupation, and of breaking up the country into numerous mini-states controlled by local warlords. The Taliban arose in the largely Pashtun south in 1994, and rapidly extended their control, as their goals of enforcing Islamic Shariat and maintaining Afghan unity were shared by most local warlords.

The non-Pashtun groups retreated to the north where Ahmad Shah Masood controlled the mountainous Panjshir region. When the Taliban extended their control over Kabul and Mazar-i-Sharif in 1997, thus establishing their writ over 90 per cent of the country, Pakistan extended recognition, turning the Northern Alliance into an enemy. However, only Saudi Arabia and the UAE followed Pakistan in recognising the new regime.

Though Pakistan had to do business with the Taliban government in Kabul, many differences developed. The Taliban not only enforced a puritan version of Islam, but also fell under the influence of the militants led by Osama bin Laden, who was now organising terrorist attacks on US embassies and military units around the world. India also exploited Pakistan’s relations with the Taliban by accusing them of training Kashmiri freedom fighters on Afghan soil. The relationship with the Taliban became an embarrassment for Islamabad, as the regime destroyed sacred statues of the Buddha in Bamiyan, despite Pakistan’s efforts to save these archaeological treasures.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks were traced to Al Qaeda that was operating under the patronage of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. When President Bush declared the war on terror, he issued an ultimatum to all countries either to join in the war or be considered as supporters of terrorism. Under the leadership of President Musharraf, Pakistan had to take a critical decision, as India was waiting to take advantage of the situation to attack it together with the superpower. However, Pakistan decided to join the US-led coalition.

Having previously alienated the Northern Alliance, whose leaders developed close relations with India, Iran and Russia, Pakistan has now lost the friendship of the Pashtuns, the main backers of the Taliban. In spite of its key role in the resistance to Russian occupation, and the presence of a large Pashtun population in its border provinces, Pakistan finds itself at a serious disadvantage in exercising any influence in Kabul. Though a Pashtun, Hamid Karzai, emerged as the president in Kabul, the apparatus of the government is largely dominated by the Northern Alliance.

Since 2002, Afghanistan has resumed its entente with India, which has gone all out to exploit popular resentment against Pakistan, to the extent that the two are collaborating against Pakistan even at the multilateral level. They sponsored a document at the Non-Aligned Conference, held recently in Malaysia, that would have labelled Kashmiri freedom fighters as “terrorists”.

Pakistan was able to counter this with some help from Malaysia. Though India had backed the Soviet Union in its occupation of Afghanistan, it has now opened a large number of consulates in Afghanistan whose main occupation appears to be to spread disaffection in the border provinces of Pakistan. India has also built a road to Iran to connect Afghanistan to the Iranian transit routes to the sea.

As the new “great game” unfolds, the stakes are higher, and the players more numerous. The US game is to dominate the distribution of energy resources of the Middle East and Central Asia, and, together with Nato, to contain China, which is emerging as a major player in Asia and the world. India is being cultivated as a strategic partner, and Pakistan is being pressured to make peace on India’s terms. Other powers with economic and strategic interests include Russia and Japan.

While both the US and the EU are increasing the number of armed forces in Afghanistan, the record of economic reconstruction and of rehabilitation of returning refugees remains abysmal. Lack of housing and employment is forcing a large number of refugees to go back to Pakistan and Iran. Pakistan can improve on its performance by completing the projects it has undertaken. The Torkham-Jalalabad road is at last open but the life of the average Afghan is still difficult, and more should be done to make things better on this score.

Afghanistan’s role will remain pivotal in the opening up of Central Asia, a region still treated by Russia as its “sphere of influence.” China has developed linkages bilaterally and through the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation with four Central Asian republics and has flooded their markets with its inexpensive consumer goods. The pacification of Afghanistan, and the emergence of viable and mutually beneficial relations with it remain critically important for Pakistan.

The linkages through the ECO and the OIC could become significant if these organisations can be revitalised. The Afghans are basically devout Muslims, and if the India connection means subservience to US-backed Israeli interests, they are unlikely to go for that. Lastly, any energy linkages with Central Asia would have to be via Afghanistan.

As the international scramble for leverage over Afghanistan gears up, we need to accord a high priority to our relations with Afghanistan. Our close relations with China and Turkey can be an asset, and skilful use of the Islamic connection will also be necessary. Above all, we need greater unity at home, with appropriate regard for the requirements and grievances of the tribal areas and Balochistan.