Some people realise their purpose in life earlier on. They keep striving for it for decades and their struggle yields fruit as they themselves age or after their worldly departure. But their earnest struggle leaves a legacy for generations to come.
Akhtar Hameed Khan was such a man. His deep desire to serve, his wisdom, humility and knowledge, and his perseverance bore fruit in the later part of his life. And yet his legacy continues to affect the lives of the impoverished masses all over the developing world to date.
In 1980, Akhtar Hameed Khan at the ripe age of 66 founded the NGO called Orangi Pilot Project in Karachi, Pakistan as a participatory development initiative. The project changed how the world saw the concepts of micro credit, rural development, community organisation and grassroots change.
Akhtar was born in 1914 to a wealthy noble family in India. As a young boy he was encouraged by his mother to read famour Urdu and Persian poets. He took keen interest in philosophy, literature and history and was inclined towards Sufism.
He served as a British Government Civil Servant before the partition took place. Before long he resigned from his prestigious job as according to him, ‘I realized that if I did not escape while I was young and vigorous, I will forever remain in the trap, and terminate as a bureaucratic big wig.’ To understand the lives of the common people better, he worked as a labourer and a locksmith in a little village in India for two years.
He went on to teach in Delhi and took up the same vocation when he came to Pakistan. He was posted as a Principal of Comilla Victoria College in East Pakistan (presently Bangladesh) in 1950 where he founded the stellar Comilla Cooperatives that used enterprising ideas of microfinance and other participatory models for rural development.The initiatives were a network of interdependent programmes that depended on community’s will and intent to change their lives.
They included the establishment of: a training and development centre; a road-drainage embankment works programme; a decentralised, small scale irrigation programme; and, a two-tiered cooperative system with primary cooperatives operating in the villages, and federations operating at sub-district level.
Under the Comilla Co-operatives scheme, Dr. Khan also introduced microsavings. Initially the villagers could not grasp the concept, and Arthur F. Raper wrote of these villagers in his book: “‘What does the man [Dr. Khan] mean — telling us [villagers] to save?’…‘When we tell him we are too poor to save, he says that is why we must save.’” Raper went on to write in reference to said scheme: “The savings in the early days appear tiny indeed. During April, savings of the first seven agriculture societies ranged from Rs.12.00 to Rs. 65.00. The per-member monthly savings ranged from Rs.0. 60 (12 cents) to Rs. 2.65.”
Crediting Dr. Khan on microcredit, Louis A. Picard, Robert Groelsema, and Terry F. Buss wrote in their book entitled, Foreign Aid and Foreign Policy: Lessons for the Next Half-Century: “The village small cooperative loan system set up through Comilla was a forerunner of the Grameen Bank, now considered a major breakthrough in terms of microcredit.”
His work at Comilla earned him the Ramon Magsaysay Award (some call it Asia’s Nobel Prize) and an honorary doctorate of law from the MichiganStateUniversity.
When Bangladesh was formed in 1971, Akhtar moved back to Pakistan but continued his advisory role to development initiatives in both Bangladesh and Pakistan. He also served as visiting faculty at the Princeton, Lund, Harvard and OxfordUniversities.
The Comilla Cooperatives however failed after Akhtar’s departure. After a few years only 61 out 600 cooperatives were working due to ineffective internal and external controls, misappropriation of funds and stagnation. It also led Akhtar and the later pioneers of micro credit to introduce some level of internal control into micro credit initiatives formed later on.
Unfazed by Comilla’s lack of growth, Akhtar established his Orangi Pilot Project (OPP) in the impoverished slum periphery of Karachi with a view to help the people change their lives themselves.
The project initially focused on creating a system of underground sewers, using local materials and labour, and succeeded in laying hundreds of kilometres of drainage pipes along with auxiliary facilities. Within a decade of the initiative, local residents had established schools, health clinics, women’s work centres, cooperative stores and a credit organisation to finance enterprise projects.
By 1993, OPP had managed to provide low-cost sewers to more than 72,000 houses. The project subsequently diversified into a number of programmes, including a people’s financed and managed low-cost sanitation programme; a housing programme; a basic health and family planning programme; a programme of supervised credit for small family enterprise units; an education programme; and a rural development programme in the nearby villages.
What makes the project really special is that it is solely funded and developed by the community itself. The people are the stewards of their own destiny.
The model has to date been applied in South Africa, Chile, Central Asian states, Nepal, Sri Lanka, India. In addition, the model is being studied in Cambodia, Vietnam, Philippines, Japan and other First World Academic institutions for further applications.
Akhtar Hameed Khan died in 1999 at the ripe age of 85 and left behind a wonderful, sustainable legacy of service.
References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akhtar_Hameed_Khan
http://www.oppoct-microcredit.com/Dr.%20Akhtar%20Hamid%20Khan.htm
http://www.asiantribune.com/news/2009/10/06/remembering-dr-akhtar-hameed-khan