Pakistan: Scaling Up Rural Support Programs

This paper discusses Pakistan's Rural Support Program (RSP). It describes the features of the program:

• It pioneered bottom-up, community driven development, using a flexible, autonomous, politically neutral approach, which has been replicated successfully;
• RSPs mobilize communities to stimulate demand for better public goods and services, foster linkages between the communities and service providers, and at times directly supply services;
• They reduce poverty and increase per capita income, indirectly improving education and health in the long run;
• They have had a significant influence on the adoption of microfinance and community owned infrastructure as mainstream development strategies;
• Expansion happened by setting up autonomous RSPs, that replicated the RSP approach.

The authors also list the factors that have driven the scaling up process:

• The existence of an effective model this made the selling of the model to the government, donors and other poor communities easier;
• The non-confrontational approach adopted by the RSP with donors and other stakeholders
• The seizing of opportunities where the government provided funding directly to start new RSPs;
• The lack of the government's effort to control RSPs;
• Institutional innovation and learning;
• The social mobilization approach to expansion;
• Adoption of a holistic approach to reduce poverty, using multiple interventions.

As per the paper, the lessons learned are:

• Necessity of autonomy and governmental non-interference;
• Scaling-up through replication and not expansion.