Aga Khan Rural Support Programme (India)

Its financial inclusion initiatives focus on empowering self-help groups by connecting them to banks enabling access to credit facilities after they achieve internal fund mobilization and rotation of money.

Financial empowerment enables village women to start their own enterprises leading to prosperity and overall economic stability.

AKRSP focuses on providing education to empower children to reach their full potential and come out of poverty. Its programme seeks to pre-prepare children for joining mainstream schools, improving learning outcomes, strengthening adolescents and reducing drop-outs ensuring their enrolment and retention also encouraging tribal children to pursue higher education.

To strengthen rural institutions AKRSP runs its rural governance programmes which aim to promote and build the capacity of panchayats, improve their access to information enabling them to provide quality services to villagers and partner with panchayats to implement long-term plans enabling key development sectors.

These initiatives attempt to bring the people, panchayats and Government agencies together to increase interaction and smooth implementation of programmes.

The core principle of AKRSP is to encourage community-based organisations(CBO) to flourish. It has promoted the formation of many CBO’s viz. women’s federations fighting for women's rights and promoting gender equity, self-help groups which enable collective and individual financial stability, village development committees which work along with village-level institutions for holistic development of the village, canal irrigation management committees managing canals and upkeep of water management infrastructure, watershed development committees managing water in villages, goat rearing groups providing goat rearing and poultry services to its members, farmer producer organisations providing governance and business capacities of farmers, drinking water and sanitation management committees managing water and sanitation structures and school management committees working to ensure the delivery of best quality of education to children with community participation.

To enable youth to achieve 21st-century skills it started the Yuva Junction programme. This programme aims to provide inclusive training to youth in life and employable skills.

The Yuva Junction centres are located in remote rural locations and train youth in Retail, BPO, computer hardware, nursing, beauty and wellness and, sewing and stitching. It also encourages self-reliance amongst tribal youth and supports them with training, mentoring, networking, seed funding and facilitating financial linkages to help them start their own enterprises.

Climate change has become a real issue for the rural communities in India. Rural communities are experiencing frequent droughts, floods, cyclones, temperature variations and irregular rainfalls. This situation is leading to uncertain livelihoods for the smallholder farmers. Considering that a substantially large proportion of rural population still depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, it is important to safeguard the livelihoods of vulnerable communities. AKRSP(I) has further strengthened its traditional agriculture livelihoods improvement program considering the newer challenge of climate change. We remain committed to achieving nutrition security, income security and sustainability for smallholders in our key geographies. We have taken an integrated approach where empowerment of smallholders is the center of our program design.

Single greatest constraint for small farmers to have higher agriculture productivity and diversification is water control. With anincreasingly erratic rainfall, both for supporting during the rainfall gaps in the monsoon crop, and for water availability in winter and summer, is critical as it defines the difference between viable and difficult farming. Most rain-fed large farmers are much worse off than smaller, but irrigated farmers. AKRSP(I) supports farmers for greater water control- not only through supply side solutions but also by managing demand through promoting micro-irrigation schemes and agriculture interventions like SRI and conservation agriculture, which reduce water demand.

There is decreasing agriculture landholding in rural India, average landholding has gone down to 0.9 hectares per household. In addition, there are increasing uncertainties around agriculture livelihoods due to climate change. In such a scenario, it is critical to generate quality employment opportunities for the rural youth. Our work and enterprise program which works under the umbrella name of “Yuva Junction” is empowering rural youth through non-farm employment opportunities. Rural youth gets following services from Yuva Junction

Micro-forests are small forests in backyard lands of rural households.

Livestock is integrated part of rural livelihood systems in India particularly for small and marginal farmers. Livestock plays very critical role in risk mitigation in addition to income source for rural people. In the regions where adequate land and water resources are available dairy has emerged as important income source for the farmers. Goat rearing and poultry are less input intensive hence suitable for farmers having low resource base. Over the period of time AKRSP(I) has worked with all three sector; goat rearing, dairy and poultry.