Afghanistan is still largely a rural society with a subsistence economy based on agriculture. With a rapidly growing population, and millions of refugees having returned from neighbouring countries, the limited resources of farmland and water are under greater pressure than ever before.
AKDN’s Agriculture and Food security programme in Egypt was established in 2007 through Om Habibeh Foundation in Aswan in South Egypt. The programme was designed to improve the productivity, market access and agricultural practical knowledge and technical capacities of smallholder farmers in Aswan.
When it was established by His Highness the Aga Khan in 1984, the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme in India (AKRSP) started field operations in the state of Gujarat. Since then, AKRSP has reached over 500,000 beneficiaries in over 1,100 villages.
The Coastal Rural Support Programme (CRSP) in Kenya has been working in semi-arid, marginalised rural areas of Coast Province since 1997. Over the last decade, the programme has grown from working with four village organisations to working with 195 village organisations.
In Kyrgyzstan, the Aga Khan Foundation works through the Mountain Societies Development Support Programme (MSDSP), a locally registered NGO established in 2003. MSDSP’s overall goal is to improve living conditions in selected mountain communities in the country.
In Africa, one of the greatest challenges to development has been food security - the ability of farming populations to grow enough crops to feed their families through the "hungry" season. Typically, during this time, families eat only once a day.
In response to the extreme poverty and isolation facing rural communities of northern Mozambique, AKF created the Coastal Rural Support Programme in the province of Cabo Delgado in 2001.
Before the Karakorum Highway was built in the late 1970s, the areas of Gilgit-Baltistan and Chitral were isolated from the rest of Pakistan. Most people lived from subsistence agriculture.
Since 2003, the Rural Development Programme in Syria has worked with agriculturally reliant communities in Salamieh District on the persistent issue of water shortages.
At independence, Tajikistan faced a variety of rural development challenges precipitated by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ensuing civil war from 1992 to 1997.
The Coastal Rural Support Programme in Tanzania, or CRSP(T), is a multi-input area development programme of the Aga Khan Foundation (AKF).
