PPRP in Print and Electronic Media
Kazbano-a Tale of Resilience and Determination
- June 18, 2018
- Amir Hussain and Savaila A Hunzai
- Blog Published in "The Morning Mail"
Story of Kazbano BiBi
Kazbano Bibi aged 32 is one of 10 children of a peasant family from village Budho Samejo of district Jacobabad. Born into a wretched and conservative family Kazbano could not have the opportunity and wherewithal to attend a school. She was confined to thatched hut of her parents lending a hand to her mother in cooking and making Rillis (traditional embellished wall and floor sheets).
Kazbano was only 15 when she was married into a landless poor family where she spent most of her time tending to the extended family in a cramped mud room. Her over-indebted in laws were sharecroppers of 10% yield on a farm which was far less to feed the extended family. Kazbano says’ “The family owned five goats which used to give milk for household consumption while they were dependent on neighbours, who had buffalo, for butter and daytime meals. Kazbano gave birth to her son one year after her marriage followed by six children each with a gap of one year. She says, “All children were born in the house without the help of any midwife. I did not know about pre-delivery medical check-ups that the local Community Health Workers suggest pregnant women nowadays. In sickness, we had to travel to Thul, a place 5 km away from our village. We were not allowed to go out without a male companion. Also, unlike today, the roads were not paved and our men travelled to Thul on bullock-carts.”
Her initial days at her in-laws’ home were better than her life later with her husband, Kazbano stated. She was able to eat two meals everyday as all family members worked and earned satisfying meals. After separation from in-laws, she along with her husband and children started to live in a hut. Being the only breadwinner as a shared-cropper, her husband became frustrated which at times culminated into domestic conflict. Rainwater trickled down in her hut as Kazbano recalls “Every passing day, I faced stress, hunger and physical poverty.”........ Read Complete Article
Amina Bibi’s Journey of Transformation
- June 10, 2018
- By Amir Hussain & Savaila A Hunzai
- Blog Published in "The Morning Mail"
Story of Amina BiBi
Amina Bibi, 34, lives in Abdul Raheem village in Sindh’s Jacobabad District. Born in an impoverished family of wage labourers, she was married to a labourer at a rice mill at the tender age of 15. Amina lived in a mud house with her husband’s joint family. After three years of marriage, she gave birth to her first baby boy and then five sons and seven daughters.
“It would talk an hour to fetch a single pitcher of water. Drinking water was not available in the village and 25 households shared a single hand pump to fetch water; at times the women would engage in arguments on their turns of filling water,” says Amina.
Amina recalls, “The household’s condition worsened when the family sold out livestock and other assets to meet the treatment cost of Amina’s mother-in-law that hit the family hard and their debt increased manifold. Despite all these efforts, the mother-in-law’s life could not be saved.” The 2010 floods washed away whatever was left forcing the family to flee the area and live without food and shelter.......... Read Complete Article
The Journey of Transformation
- May 24, 2018
- Savaila Hunzai
- Blog Published in "The Morning Mail"
Story of Ayesha
Our today’s story in the series of “The Journey of Transformation” is about Ayesha from Karampur village of district Kashmore in the Upper Sindh. She was raised among eight siblings: five sisters and three brothers. Her parents were sharecroppers, working on a landlord’s field to keep the body and soul together on the meagre proceeds of their labour.
Ayesha is 45 now as a much better off person but her story is an eye opening account of misery and privation and her journey of transformation is an impressive story of a brave rural woman. As a child Ayesha’s social space was limited to her immediate family and the field of the landlord. Like other girls in the village Ayesha was never sent to school because it considered as a social stigma to allow girls and woman to interact with the outside world.
At the age 16 her marriage was arranged with one of her cousins, who were unskilled daily-wage labourer in a construction company. The joint family of her in-laws was crammed in a two-room’ mud house. Ayesha’s agony continued for years aggravated by poverty, malnourishment, exploitative working conditions at the landlord’s fields and unaccounted domestic labour. Ayesha had a miscarriage within a year of her marriage and then three had been stillborn for three years consecutively. Ayesha narrates the wretchedness, “There was no health facility nearby to consult or get a proper diagnosis of my continued abdominal pain and consecutive complexities of pregnancy. After three consecutive miscarriages, I gave birth to my fourth child who was healthy and I was the happiest mother on earth then. The misery hit us again as the health of my child started to deteriorate due to the malnourishment and his immune system was irreversibly damaged. One day my son, the only hope for me to muddling through life, succumbed to his weakness and my whole world was lost......... Read Complete Article
Journey from Plight to Prosperity
- May 11, 2018
- Amir Hussain
- Article Published in "The News"
Stories of how people transform their economic conditions help us understand the intricacies of poverty and the potential of human agency to overcome them. The stories that have been published so far in this series are firsthand accounts of rural woman who have been able to counter poverty through timely and need-based support from the Sindh government.
These are accounts of the collaboration between the government, the civil society and the people to combat poverty. These programmes need to find resonance within policymaking in Pakistan to ensure poverty alleviation at a larger scale. Investment to eradicate rural poverty through integrated rural development programmes requires support from policymakers.
The journey from plight to prosperity offers evidence-based accounts of the benefits of participatory and inclusive development programmes. While these stories don’t represent the whole gamut of our theory of change, they do represent the efficacy of rural development programmes in addressing intergenerational poverty.
Today’s story of transformation is also a firsthand account of a rural woman who was able to defeat intergenerational poverty. Nageena, a resident of Jhando Khan Village of Kashmore in Sindh, was married at the age of 15 to a man who already had another wife. Her husband owned a donkey cart, which was the only tangible asset for the joint family. His other family members used to work as sharecroppers. Nageena started her married life with her husband’s joint family in a congested two-room mud house without a toilet........ Read Complete Article
A Journey of Transformation
- May 5, 2018
- Amir Hussain and Savaila A Hunzai
- Blog Published in "The Daily Morning Mail"
Story of Hakeem Khatoon
Hakeem Khatoon of village Suleeman Buriro of district Jacobabad was only three years’ old when she lost her mother. Hakeem was sent to her maternal grandmother, while her two brothers continued to live with their father. Hakeem was coerced into labour on a landlord’s fields with her maternal uncles and aunts. When she turned 12, Hakeem was sent back to her father to live with him till her marriage at the age of 14.
Hakeem’s married life was full of hardship as her workload increased manifold. She was solely responsible to collect water, cooking for the extended family and labour work on a small piece of land owned by her in-laws.
Hakeem narrates her story “After one year of my marriage, I had my fist daughter and two years’ later the second one was born. As I did not give a son to my husband from the first two births, my husband had this excuse to marry another woman. From his second wife, he had 11 children; six sons and five daughters. When the family extended, the tensions grew and often there were arguments and fights over resources. Then the elders decided to split the piece of our land. My brother-in-law made a separate hut for his family and parents-in-law started to live with him. I along with my two daughters continued to live with my husband and his second wife. My husband received half acre of land as his share. It was not sufficient to feed the large and growing family and we would run out of basic food supplies within weeks of the harvest.” Hakeem continues, ........ Read Complete Article
Journey from Plight to Prosperity
- April 27, 2018
- Amir Hussain
- Article Published in "The News"
My previous article, ‘Recipe for rural development’ published in these pages on April 20, discussed the transformative potential of the Sindh government’s Union Council Based Poverty Reduction Program (UCBPRP). In this article, I will try to encapsulate the story of a rural woman’s journey from plight to prosperity. This journey of transformation is an eye-opening account of the impact of the collaborative work carried out by the Sindh government and the rural support programmes (RSPs) initiated through the UCBPRP. It is also the story of resilience; perseverance; and the enormous potential of finding liberation from poverty through participatory development.
Nawab Khatoon, a 38-year-old woman who was born and raised in the Abad village of District Shikarpur.......
Read Complete Article
District Level Launching of EUCBPRP in Khairpur
- April 23, 2018
Sindh Rural Support Organization (SRSO) has organized the District Launching Ceremony of Expansion of Union Council Based Poverty Reduction Programme (UCBPRP) funded by Government of Sindh at the Gyamkhana Khairpur, Sindh on April 23 , 2018. Mr. Riaz Hussain Wassan (Additional Deputy Commissioner I), Mr. Ijaz Halepoto (Assistant Commissioner Gambat) Mr. Zaffar Abbas (Assistant Commissioner Kingri), Mr. Meerani (Assistant Commissioner Khairpur), Mr. Pervaiz Ahmed Chandio (Director UCBPRP –Government of Sindh,)representatives of community institutions (CO, VOs and LSOs) from Shikarpur, Jacobabad, Kashmore- Kandhkot and Khairpur and media representatives attended the event.
Print Media Coverage
Recipe for rural development
- April 20, 2018
- Amir Hussain
- Article Published in "The News"
Rural development programmes have three key features that all the top-down development models lacked. First, they are bottom-up with a basic premise that development is not possible without building inclusive, participative, transparent, and accountable institutions for the poor at the grassroots level. Second, it is more important to equip the poor with relevant skills to access available resources rather than devise top-down solutions of resource-creation and distribution. Third, there is a need to invest in local institutions for the poor through a multi-input poverty alleviation approach.
This experiment of the collaborative development model in four districts of Sindh (Shikarpur, Jacobabad, Kashmore and Tharparkar) provides a realistic policy choice for all provincial governments to invest in integrated rural development programmes. .......
Read Complete Article
District Level Launching of EUCBPRP in Makli, Thatta
- February 21, 2018
Sindh Rural Support Organization (SRSO) has organized the District Launching Ceremony of Expansion of Union Council Based Poverty Reduction Programme (UCBPRP) funded by Government of Sindh at the Makli Gyamkhana distrcit Thatta, Sindh on February 21 , 2018. Mr. Ghulam Qadir Plejo, Mr. Usman Tanveer (Additional Deputy Commissioner I), Mr. Pervaiz Ahmed Chandio (Director UCBPRP –Government of Sindh,)representatives of community institutions (CO, VOs and LSOs) from Shikarpur, Jacobabad, Kashmore- Kandhkot and Khairpur and media representatives attended the event.
Print Media Coverage
Launching Ceremony of EUCBPRP_ January 08, 2018 in Sukkur.
- January 08, 2018
Launching Ceremony of the Expansion of UC-based Poverty Reduction Programme was held on Monday 08 January 2018 in Sukkur. Chairman Pakistan People's Party Mr. Bilawal Zardari accompanied by the Chief Minister of the SIndh Mr. Murad Ali Shah graced the occasion with their presence and inaugurated the Expansion of UCBPRP. Ex CM Sindh Syed Qaim Ali Shah and SRSO chairman Shoaib Sultan, Leader of the Opposition in the National Assembly Syed Khursheed Ahmed Shah, Sindh PPP President Nisar Ahmed Khuhro, Information Minister Syed Nasir Hussain Shah and other senior party leaders of PPP, elected public representatives, as well as senior officials of various departments,Members of Districts Councils and other dignitaries of the concerned districts,14000 Women members of Community Organizations and community leaders/ CRPs and media representatives attended the ceremony.
Print Media Coverage
Launching Ceremony of PPRP January 08, 2018 in Sukkur.
- January 08, 2018
- Media Coverage in "ARY News"
Launching Ceremony of the Expansion of UC-based Poverty Reduction Programme was held on Monday 08 January 2018 in Sukkur.
Electronic media coverage by ARY News.
Launching Ceremony of EUCBPRP_ January 08, 2018 in Sukkur.
- January 08, 2018
- Media Coverage in "Channel 24 News"
Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) Chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari was speaking at a ceremony organised by the Sindh Rural Support Organisation (SRSO) in Sindh’s Sukkur district. He said non-governmental organisations (NGOs) were instrumental in implementation of poverty alleviation initiatives and public-private partnership was beneficial to masses and helped bring about prosperity in society. It also created employment and business opportunities.
Electronic media coverage by Channel 24 News .
Launching Ceremony of PPRP January 08, 2018 in Sukkur.
- January 08, 2018
- Media Coverage in "KTN News"
PPP women wing president MNA Ms. Faryal Talpur, speaking to the audience, said that those who were talking of a “change” should realise that the real change was bringing about prosperity and ensure massive development in the country. She said this on the occasion of Inaugural Ceremony of Expansion of the UCBPRP in 6 districts of the Sindh Province .
Electronic media coverage by KTN News.