About us

About Rural Aid Pakistan

Rural Aid Pakistan is a not for profit and non-government humanitarian organization registered with Security and Exchange Commission of Pakistan -SECP under section 42 of the Companies Act 2017 and certified by Pakistan Centre for Philanthropy – PCP. Rural Aid is working at grass root level in rural areas of Pakistan to fight against poverty and empowering the marginalized and vulnerable rural communities for sustainable development. Rural Aid works to alleviate poverty and inequalities in the society by applying inclusive and holistic transformational development approach.

Rural Aid Pakistan is working through a tri-dimensional model and has brought integration to tackle the root cause of poverty and its allied ailments. This model connects the essential dots and bridges the sector-wide gaps to achieve holistic development and empowerment of the rural communities.

Geographical Coverage: Rural Aid is working at national level and implementing projects in Punjab, Sindh, KPK, Baluchistan, Azad Jamun & Kashmir and Gilgit Baltistan.

Thematic Areas: Climate Change & Food Security, Water, Sanitation & Hygiene (WASH), Sustainable Livelihood, Education and Literacy, Health, Disaster Management & Disaster Risk Reduction.

VISION: “A society with improved living standards without poverty and discrimination”

We affirm that our programs have the potential to improve the social and economic justice and people are resilient from disasters and emergencies. We also believe that our systematic approaches and actions can bring about a radical change in the society.

MISSION: Empowering the marginalized and vulnerable segments through providing sustainable development solutions.

VALUES: We are independent and free from political, ethnic, and religious affiliations. We help people in need regardless of caste, creed, or nationality.  We have a set of principles that we follow during the planning and execution of our work. Rural Aid’s principles are designed to achieve excellence and promote:

  • Transformation: We believe that immediate actions, innovations— within our programming can support healthy transformations.
  • Empowerment: Community Empowerment is core to our intervention; we believe that empowerment is the key to development accelerations.
  • Partnership and Collaboration: We respect and value integrations thrive on our collaboration, we build bottom to top partnerships to add more diversity to our development and humanitarian programs.
  • Transparency and Accountability: We are transparent and accountable, we care and maintain accuracy in our commitments, we are always accountable to our partners and supporters and communities.
  • Equality: We believe in the equality of human being; our thoughts and actions are free from all sort of disparities and inequalities.
  • Inclusion: Including women and girls, persons with disabilities, transgenders, young and aged people and religious minorities in our all programs to build resilient communities.
  • Creativity and Sustainability: We always welcome new ideas, accept change we take calculated risks to add sustainability to our actions.

KEY PRIORITY AREAS

Rural Aid’s distinctive mandate is alleviating poverty and fighting injustice and inequalities. Rural Aid works to alleviate poverty and inequalities in the society by applying inclusive and holistic transformational development approach.

The Strategic Framework (2023-2027) is prepared in response to a national context keeping in view the chronic issues and quickly changing factors including growing rural livelihoods, enhancement of employment opportunities and accelerating natural resource degradation and climate change.

This strategic plan will inform the growth and guide Rural Aid over the declared period. In the coming three years, Rural Aid will implement multiple programs and project in Pakistan and AJK across 4 key priority areas:

  1. Encourage inclusive rural growth leading to economic development and enhancement of employment opportunities.
  2. Increase equitable access to quality social services, including health, education, WASH.
  3. Reduce vulnerabilities to natural disasters, food insecurity and climate change.
  4. Promote good governance and Gender Justice.

 

STRATEGIC PRINCIPLES

Rural Aid is a rights-based development and humanitarian organization and believes in the equalities and inclusions, hence gender equality and social inclusion will be addressed as cross-cutting themes in each of these thematic areas. In all of its work Rural Aid will adhere to the following strategic principles:

  • Focus on community empowerment and gender equality
  • Strategic partnerships development
  • Environment compliant programming.
  • Innovation, continuous learning and up scaling.

 

PARTNERSHIP STRATEGIES

Rural Aid is united by core value of development and community transformation. We apply demand-driven, inclusive, and holistic approach for poverty alleviation and social justice. To achieve this, we have adopted three-tier partnership strategy that simultaneously works at all levels this includes; top, middle and bottom level partnership. We bridge the gaps between boundary partners and solution providers and link them with relevant middle level partners for the effective and smooth transition of the course of action to achieve desired results.

At the bottom level we ensure the participation of men, women, and all necessary stakeholders in planning and execution process.  We take a consistent approach to developing our community partners these structures ensure quality and sustainability of our interventions.

We tackle the root causes of poverty and injustice by empowering poor and marginalized men, women and children in a way that they can take account of the social, economic, political and cultural factors, and take ownership of their own development, humanitarian and advocacy initiatives. We help people to find the resources they need to meet their identified needs. The purpose is to break the cycle of poverty, both economic poverty and ‘poverty of opportunity’.

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT

Rural Aid’s participatory integrated community development approach works through boosting active community involvement and participation in problem identification, planning, implementation, monitoring & evaluation process, ownership development and empowerment. Our participatory approach helping partner communities to build strong connections with market & safety nets, enhance local socio-economic development, create more vibrant, climate friendly and resilient communities.

When community members come together for a common purpose – which is ultimately village wide socio-economic development – they are in a stronger position to bring about sustainable improvements in the quality of life. We believe that equal participation of men, women and children in the development programing can achieve the landmark of a just and prosper world, a world, without disparities, injustice, and chronic diseases of poverty. The first step of our approach to addressing common problems is to organize people into village level organizations known as Community Led Organizations (CLOs).

The relevant communities create these grassroots level institutions. After the formation these groups are capacitated in technical and management aspects so that they can plan, implement and monitor local level development, humanitarian and advocacy projects.

Rural Aid’s integrated community development approach works through boosting active community involvement, strong participation and ownership development and further farming multi-functional community groups under CLOs i.e. Enterprise Development Group, Men Support Group, Women Support Group, Farmer Support Group, Youth Support Groups, Health Management Committee, Women Health Committee, WASH Committee, Education Committee, School Management Committee, Disaster Management Committee and Child Protection Committees that are then able to identify and address local issues.

ORGANIZATIONAL STRENGTHS

  • Clear vision, strategy and Effective leadership
  • Community Outreach and knowledge of the target areas
  • Improved and capacitated community support mechanism
  • Effective women and men groups and trained youth volunteers in all programing districts
  • Support from the community volunteers and cost efficiency in community programing
  • Experienced, local, proactive, dynamic management and staff members
  • Credibility with partner organizations at the partners, community and stakeholder’s level
  • Attachment with the cause: Motivated and committed team willingness to contribute to the promotion of health, education, WASH, sustainable livelihood, gender equality and youth engagement, climate change and food security particularly in the far-flung rural areas.
  • Experience with grass roots socially excluded communities in managing projects
  • Effective and functional linkages and coordination with Government departments/GOs and NGOs
  • Office infrastructure to support the project implementation
  • Well-established, policies, transparent systems and procedures (Financial, Administrative, Program Level)
  • Cost efficiency in managing programs.