April 10, 2003

An NGO‘s initiative to reduce poverty in drought affected areas has kept in consideration the traditional practices of the poor, writes Robin Fernandez

A major initiative to reduce poverty among Pakistan’s drought-stricken communities got its first public airing in Karachi last month, amid applause and calls for backup sustainable solutions and a water survey.

Crafted by the Tharparkar-based Participatory Village Development Programme (PVDP), the initiative is the first of its kind for drought affected people in the country’s southern and southwestern provinces. It relies on traditional practices for improving the conditions of the poor, and building on their existing resources. Already some development workers have hailed it as a pioneering effort because it does not involve hard-cash loans.

Except for one small activity in which a woman is given a soft loan worth a 1,000 rupees, the poverty reduction model is run entirely without cash investment. That kind of loan-dispensing is deemed useless by a majority of people, including loan recipients. Dominic Stephen, president of the PVDP, explains, “The poor have no way to invest the cash [in Thar] and therefore the opportunity of reducing poverty with cash investment remains closed.”

Villagers baulk at the prospect of cash loans, knowing full well these must be paid back with a mark-up. Of course, they wouldn’t have been averse to loans had they found sustainable livelihoods.

Six income-bearing activities have been identified as part of the anti-poverty strategy. In the first instance, a household is provided with six she-goats with an eye to boost its nutritional intake. “Goat’s milk is readily available to the family members, and the nutritional needs of babies and lactating mothers are thus fulfilled,” says a PVDP worker, counting the benefits of the first activity. “In time the population of the [beneficiary household’s] small flock increases as well.” Male kids can then be sold for anything between 1,200 and 1,500 rupees. Women empowerment is also a goal. “We give useful animals to the womenfolk, for they are the ones who tend flocks, or raw materials for producing handicrafts. They get financial returns and gain respect as a result,” he added.

Overall, PVDP officials estimate, beneficiary households could save 20,000 rupees in milk value and earn up to 15,000 rupees over a three-year period from the small-flock programme. This is based on a revolving loan scheme in which two goats are recovered by the project every year. To qualify for this and another five programmes, the organization has set a few conditions for each household. Beneficiaries must have school-going children, one to five acres of land, a goat or two, as well as embroidery skills or some degree of craftsmanship. Those selected must be without regular income, and have no access to drinking water.

A second activity would be planting fodder trees, whereby the new goat owners can ensure that their animals survive during drought years. Fodder, after all, is as important as the livestock itself. The fodder trees PVDP encourages households to plant are drought resistant. Up to 50 trees can be grown at a cost of 1,000 rupees per household and the value of the fodder produced is estimated at 6,000 rupees. A full-grown tree can produce up to 40 kilos of fodder per year.

According to a PVDP official, the fodder plantation effort also helps to improve the environment by stabilising the soil and reducing land degradation and desertification levels.

A third related activity concerns the grafting of jujube or bair trees. Families enduring drought conditions are given tools and passed on the technique to graft 50 trees of the local bair variety. These can be grown at a combined cost of 2,500 rupees. It can take anywhere between two and three years to produce larger jujube of the marketable variety. Upon bearing fruit, the tree can produce a minimum of 20 kilos. In just one season these grafted trees can produce up to 1,000 kilos. Each household stands to gain at least 5,000 rupees annually from jujube sales.

Jujube have a high level of vitamins A & C, carotene, phosphorus and calcium. It ensures a degree of food security for the people, since the fruit is produced even in severe drought conditions.

As their fourth activity, PVDP workers propose the creation of rainwater harvesting tanks. For decades, Pakistan’s Thar desert has had scarce water resources, and these, too, have been depleting year after year. Known reserves of water are brackish and unsafe for drinking. Coupled with that hazard is the long distance that the female water gatherers have to travel just to fetch a gallon or so. A single twin-tank water supply facility can be built for each household at a cost of 2,500 rupees.

These tanks are built at a household level to collect rainwater. Once filled these tanks can supply drinking water for a family of six to seven members for up to five months. The collected water will also save the time of women and enable them to participate in some other gainful labour. “We are not counting its [the storage tank’s] advantage in monetary terms but looking at its rich health benefits,” says the PVDP president.

The fifth component of the poverty reduction model is the manufacture and use of a fuel-efficient stove—a popular item judging from the reaction of the Thar villagers. “The public acceptability level is terrific, as is its tree protection potential. The major benefit of the stove is that it saves one-third of the firewood,” explains Dominic Stephen.

The average household in Thar burns about 10 kilos of wood per day. But if the same household uses a fuel-efficient stove it will be able to save 3.3 kilos of wood each day. A wonder indeed, because that would ensure that 42,000 full-grown trees aren’t chopped down. Such a stove could also eventually help to slow down land degradation and desertification processes. Each stove costs only 700 rupees, according to PVDP, but its regular use can save firewood worth 3,600 rupees for each household per year.

The sixth activity of handicraft-making involves poor women who are hard-pressed to tackle their family’s food security problems. PVDP buys raw materials for women so they can produce folk embroidery items and sell them in the market. The organization also helps the makers to improve the quality and design of their products. A small loan of 1,000 rupees is enough to purchase raw materials. A skilled woman can earn up to 30 rupees per day, or 10,000 rupees in a year, without disturbing her daily routine too much.

The poverty reduction model, as a whole, would cost 17,000 rupees per household, if one includes the staff and monitoring expenses. Though that is fairly steep, development workers insist the overheads aren’t really prohibitive as it is merely a one-time investment. PVDP officials are confident that their model will yield positive results and be replicated later by the people themselves.

The big test, however, is to see whether recipient families can cash enough from the PVDP investment to pay off their donors in three years—as is stipulated by the organisation. If the incomes generated match the amounts projected by the PVDP planners, they surely will.

Proactive plans

An annual household income crossing the 43,000-rupee-mark is enviable in a desert region like Thar. This means that a beneficiary family would earn about 3,620 rupees per month—an amount exclusive of income the households earn from working as herders and growers of traditional crops of millet and green beans.

The poverty reduction model is to be managed by the para development committees and Goth Sujag Markaz, according to the PVDP chief. “Initially, we plan to take 10 model villages in which five pilot model families will be taken from each village. So, in all there will be 50 model families placed under the project,” Dominic Stephen pointed out. An estimated 850,000 rupees will be used up to support the model families. The Australian High Commission’s Direct Action Programme (DAP) has provided the bulk of the support.

The strategy is to be implemented in the villages over a one year period. “We are confident that it is a sustainable model, one that works with people’s resources,” a PVDP worker remarked. “Although cash investments are effective in a few places, they aren’t all that useful in Thar,” he said.

At its March 18 launch meeting, PVDP invited a panel of development experts to look at its anti-poverty plan and read the fine print as it were, following lengthy presentation sessions. It took just fifteen minutes for them to come up with accolades as well as a fresh set of recommendations—which wasn’t surprising as they had already been well briefed about the model.

On behalf of the panel, Zafar Junejo, of the Trust for Rural Development, gave it an unofficial thumbs-up. Calling it a socially organic model, Junejo observed that it was rare to find an indigenously-produced “poverty reduction” or development strategy in Pakistan. He also noted with satisfaction that the model was thoroughly applicable to the whole of Sindh, as the province has 61 per cent arid land.

The panel, according to Junejo, wants PVDP to pay more attention to the marketing of handicrafts and bair fruit, establishing forward linkages and proper legal documentation than was previously considered. It advocates further searches for sustainable solutions, carrying out a water survey, and resorting to backups on animal and plant disease controls.

The panel members also stressed the need for effective social management of the poverty reduction programme, and working out contingency plans in the face of expansion problems. Similar activities launched by the PVDP in the past have produced fair results, they said. But the latest initiative, they added, represents the first real hope for desert dwellers to break their damning cycle of poverty. — R.F.

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