Kenya home

Rural Development

Education

Health

Microfinance

Economic Development

Other Countries

Rss

Rural Development

AKF's rural development activities include mobilising communities through the establishment and strengthening of village organisations.Much of the Aga Khan Foundation’s (AKF) early work in East Africa was characterised by a focus on technical issues (e.g., what makes for effective teaching in poorly resourced classrooms? Can low-cost teaching aids be created from local materials? Can communities look after their own health needs?). These were, and remain, important questions. It became increasingly urgent, however, to create strong institutions at various levels capable in themselves of determining new directions of development. New programmes increasingly stressed the creation, strengthening, and sustainability of local institutions.

The decision to introduce to Africa the rural support approach to income enhancement that had proved successful in Asia was driven, in fact, by the failure of an AKF-sponsored health project to meet all its objectives. Communities in the ecologically challenging district of Kwale on the Kenyan coast had struggled for six years to overcome high morbidity and mortality rates, especially among women and children. Aided by a skilled Aga Khan Health Service team, some of whom had learned successful techniques of community mobilisation and training in Kisumu, community groups provided better immunisation, growth-monitoring and pre-natal care. However, it gradually became clear that they were making little progress on malnutrition and deaths from water-borne diseases.

The Foundation recognised that these communities needed more help than health professionals alone could give them if they were to address the underlying issues of lack of water, inadequate food and low incomes. It therefore mobilised international and local resources to launch a full-scale parallel rural development project.

The Kwale Rural Support Programme opened offices in Mariakani in early 1997. By May, it was fully staffed with Kenyan specialists, several of whom had already been to study the two "sister" projects in India and Pakistan as well as BRAC's Rural Development Programme in Bangladesh. The Kwale project aimed to contribute to sustainable and equitable improvements in the livelihoods of target communities.

The core of CRSP(K)'s work, food security, has been focused on facilitating farmer field schools, promoting drought tolerant crops (such as cassava), crop diversification, facilitating the construction of water harvesting infrastructure (106 small farm reservoirs, 5 large dams, roof harvesting structures), promoting soil conservation and enhancing livestock. CRSP(K) has trained a range of para-professionals and community resource people to support these interventions. The programme has also facilitated producer groups for aloe, neem, honey, high value crops and poultry.

Another bold experiment has been in indigenous philanthropy. Proponents of national philanthropy are aware of the need to strengthen the capacity of grass-roots organisations to manage money responsibly and to use it to obtain socially useful results. The Foundation's first experiment with creating a local organisation to help smaller groups improve their effectiveness is the Zanzibar NGO Resource Centre. Only two years old, this fledgling mentor of other citizen groups is beginning to be a focal point for NGO activity on the islands, providing space for meetings, and information about legislation and NGO tactics elsewhere. It is currently developing its own management and training capacity so that it can become an effective motivator of change agents in the communities it serves.