NRSP Sargodha 2.79

NRSP's mandate is to alleviate poverty by harnessing people's potential and undertake development activities in Pakistan. It has a presence in 56 Districts in all the four Provinces including Azad Jammu and Kashmir through Regional Offices and Field Offices. NRSP is currently working with more than half a million poor households organized into a network of more than 115,076 Community Organizations. With sustained incremental growth, it is emerging as Pakistan's leading engine for poverty reduction and rural development.

Vision and Purpose

NRSP works to release the potential abilities, skills and knowledge of rural men and women, to enable them to articulate their aspirations and to effectively marshal the resources they need to meet their identified needs. The purpose is poverty alleviation - enabling people to break the cycle of poverty, which begins with lack of opportunity, extends to the well-known miseries of economic and nutritional poverty and leads new generations to endure the same conditions. The process is social mobilization - bringing people together on new terms for a common purpose. The conceptual tools are 'social guidance' (recruiting local men and women who will take on a leadership role), advocacy, capacity building and awareness raising. The programmatic tools are training, support to institutions, micro-credit, infrastructure development, natural resource management and 'productive linkages'.

Our purpose as an advocate for the poor is to bring the concerns of economically-marginal men and women to public consciousness and to affect policy so that the poor are brought into the mainstream of the economy.

NRSP's vision is manifested in expanded opportunities for income-generation; community schools which provide quality primary education, community owned and managed infrastructure schemes, improved agricultural productivity, higher returns for labour and so on. From the widest perspective the vision is manifested as the first stages of a transformation of civil society.

As of July 2005 a total of 522,836 rural men and women decided it would be to their advantage to take part in NRSP’s social mobilization process, believing it to be the best way to address the problems of poverty and under-development in their villages.

For both new and long-term CO members, participation brings about new levels of awareness concerning service provision and infrastructure development in their villages. CO membership also helps people to improve their asset base, by increasing both their income and their ‘social capital’. This might be brought about by adding land to their holdings, increasing the number of animals they own, pooling economic resources to buy new and improved inputs and equipment for farms or businesses, or diversifying the stock for their small shops.

CO participation enables people to accumulate savings, perhaps for the first time in their lives. It gives the rural poor access to an affordable financial service (micro credit) that is designed specifically for them. It provides an outlet through which to invest their savings for household needs and community development schemes. For some of the very poorest and most vulnerable people, such as the former bonded labourers in the NRSP-ILO Project in Hyderabad, NRSP membership provides the possibility of achieving a foothold on a more certain and improved economic future.

CO membership enables rural men and women to greatly expand the purchasing power of their savings and other assets. The best example is NRSP’s partnership with the Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund, in which the CO’s contribution of 20% of the cost of a community physical infrastructure scheme is multiplied fourfold by the PPAF grant. As of July 2005 a total of 281,101 rural households benefited from these CPIs: in all, CO contributions of Rs 340,711,213 were parlayed into schemes worth Rs 1055,192,435. Other examples of leverage are found in numerous small-scale partnerships between NRSP, COs and the private or public sectors.

M. H. Khan’s study of NRSP COs found that “ … there is a 7.5% additional increase in income over non-members leading to significant economic impact on the participating households in terms of their total and farm income, total expenditure, savings, consumer durable goods, and children in school and it tends to increase with time …”.

The fact that NRSP works in 32 Districts that encompass diverse socio-economic, geographical and cultural conditions is evidence that the paradigm of social development which NRSP embraces can be applied successfully anywhere in Pakistan. Wherever it operates, NRSP is always working to improve its performance, to reach more deeply into communities, to learn how best to respond to the issues people identify as their priorities, and to work more efficiently and cost-effectively to deliver the programme. NRSP is committed to continuously refining its development vision. Despite the complexity of the task, poverty-alleviation remains the purpose of NRSP’s existence.