Authors Posts by comms

comms

In a straight line, Old Subhani lies 30 kilometres due east of Umerkot town; it is a tad longer by the tarmac road. Here Jagisa is a member of the Advisory Committee established in October 2022 after the Community World Service Asia’s training sessions under the HERD project. She says she did not miss a single session. Jagisa is the kind of person who needs no prompting to speak and is quick to relate how being a part of the embroidery makers of Taanka she learned at least one new stitch she had never known before.

“Hurmuchi is a stitch that adds so much value to our work. Earlier we were doing straightforward applique rallis. Now there is greater variety in our products,” says Jagisa. “Just a year before the training a typical ralli bedspread would sell for no more than PKR 800 (Approx. USD 2.8) in the village. It would fetch the same price in Umerkot.”

Now a ralli of the same size fetches PKR 1500 (Approx. USD 5.3) in the village. The better design has greater demand in Umerkot where their menfolk sell them. And if the men only knew the art of haggling, they could get a couple of hundred rupees more. The Taanka group in Old Subhani is also turning out traditional Sindhi embroidered caps. Jagisa relates that the contractor supplies them the raw material and pays labour at PKR 1000 per cap (Approx. USD 3.5). Normally, it would take any woman fifteen to twenty days to turn out one of the more intricately patterned cap. A simpler one takes under ten days. However, if they get their own material, Jagisa says their profit would be in the range of PKR 800 (Approx. USD 6.3).

Kasuba, also a member of the Taanka group, points out that this new stitch being unknown in their village before the training, is now practiced by every applique maker. She says there were several young women who had not joined the training sessions and she has taken it upon herself to teach hurmuchi to all those women and even much younger girls.

Speaking of the drought of 2021, Lakhma, a member of the Resolution Committee, says it was a sort of blessing in disguise for the village. In such a situation in the past, leaving a man or two in each para (precinct) of the village, the community would migrate to the irrigated districts west of Umerkot. “First off, we got monthly rations for six months from CWSA which obviated the need to migrate. That meant our children who would be pulled out of school continued their education. Then we also got two goats per household and that was all the more reason to stay put,” she says.

Lakhma points out how the long trek to the irrigated area sometimes killed off their livestock. But for some years now, they no longer walk as it was before the web of tarmac was laid across the desert. Now they can get on the taxis that zoom around the desert. But living away from home was never free of insecurity and discomfort. There they had to build their temporary shelters of bamboo and wattle, usually open on one side and without a door leaving no room for privacy. “We did not migrate either in 2022 or this year, our children have remained in school and we are in our own homes,” she says.

Now, July has always been the start of the cotton picking season in the canal-irrigated districts and that was one activity the women of Thar never missed. Though the work was very hard, it nonetheless meant good money. But this year when the contractor came to recruit pickers from Old Subhani, Lakhma saw a relative and her husband preparing to go. “They would have been gone for two months and school was reopening in August. I told them to stay. There was plenty of work with the road building crews near the village. Here the men work during the day and come home to sleep with the family,” she says.

Convinced by Lakhma’s argument, the family turned down the contractor’s offer and stayed. The man and his older son are now employed on a road crew and as Lakhma said, both men return in the evening to sleep in their own home. And they together have PKR 1500 to show for their labours. She believes this being the only family that almost went and then didn’t in the end, it was the last time the cotton contractor called upon them. “He knows our ways have changed,” she adds.

On a more physical level, the village is turning green: women are planting trees in their courtyards. Besides the usual ber fruit (Genus Zizyphus) and date palm, women are experimenting with chikoo (sapodilla) and having heard from nearby villages that they do well, are also planting lemon trees.

A new level of awareness is now upon all the women who have undergone the CWSA training sessions. From Old Subhani and other villages, one hears a common refrain on how the gender awareness sessions have helped these communities. Customarily, men were served food first and the best of it too. Women satisfied themselves later with the leftovers. Now families dine together and the menu is shared out equally among girls and boys. The thought is banished that men having to go out to labour required better food. Now, they are mindful of the fact that tending livestock, fetching water from the well and keeping the home clean was also labour intensive.

Kasuba points out that chores outside in the fields are done collectively and when they are finished they collect firewood on the way back. She says that her son returns from school at 2:00 in the afternoon and after his meal, goes out to fetch water and firewood. Time was when firewood collection was considered manful enough, fetching water was strictly a woman’s job. Across the Thar Desert, the greatest mark printed in the sand by CWSA is the reason for communities to abjure the annual transmigration to join the wheat harvest and later cotton picking as a means of earning a livelihood. Their staying home means children who would otherwise have migrated with them in March and lost out two months of schooling before the summer vacations, now continue their education.

Learning Camp 2024

A four-day workshop, followed by mentoring session

This engaging regional programme (Asia Pacific), aims to bring together practitioners from across the region, who work to support people and communities, to share and learn about contextualising quality, accountability, and managing systematic change processes to improve organisational performance to ensure accountability.

Camp Schedule:

CAMP I

4-day workshop 26th – 29th April, 2024 (Bangkok, Thailand)
Mentoring session 2-Hour Virtual (As requested by the participants)
CAMP II

4-day workshop – September, 2024 (Venue TBC)
Mentoring session 2-Hour Virtual (As requested by the participants)

Note: You may apply for any of the two workshops depending on your schedule. In the registration link, please mention which of the two workshops you are applying for.

The 4-day workshop will:

  • Share updates on the latest developments on themes around Quality and Accountability
  • Introduce methodologies and tools that will facilitate discussions on contextualisation, localisation, and learning for continuous improvement in future initiatives which ensures communities are at the centre
  • Explore components of Quality and Accountability and study practices around Q&A being implemented in other countries through peer learning
  • Collaboratively explore key components and processes that are needed to systemically manage changes that are required in an organisation to be more accountable
  • Enable participants to provide continuous support to their own organisations, network members, and partners on Q&A

Post-workshop mentoring will:

  • Help participants to think through how Q&A is applied systematically in their organisational and country context
  • Support participants to explore how to navigate some of the specific challenges they face after they have created an action plan
  • Help address other issues identified by participants in trying to implement Q&A in their organisation/s

Who is the camp for:

Humanitarian & Development workers who:

  • Have a responsibility for and basic experience of mainstreaming and strengthening Quality and Accountability processes and procedures in their organisation(s)/country
  • Are interested in deepening their learning and in promoting Quality and Accountability to Affected People
  • Reside in an Asia Pacific country and actively work there
  • Have a ‘good enough’ command of English
  • Will attend all the days of workshop, and subsequently implement necessary changes in their organisation to strengthen Q&A

What are you paying:

  • US $800 per participant for UN/INGOs
  • US $600 per participant for National/Local Organisations

This is based on partial cost recovery. This fee covers shared accommodation, breakfast, lunch, refreshments during the training, training materials and trainers’ costs.

Apply now:

Click here to apply before 25th March, 2024

Click here to download the brochure

Who are we?

Community World Service Asia (CWSA) is a humanitarian and development organisation and a member of Sphere and the Core Humanitarian Standard (CHS) Alliance. We are also the Regional Focal Point for the Asian Disaster Reduction & Response Network’s (ADRRN) Quality & Accountability Hub, Sphere Country Focal Point in Pakistan and the Regional Partner in Asia for Sphere. CWSA is highly committed towards Accountability to Affected People and People Centred Aid.


Once you have submitted the application, the selection committee will review your application. If you meet the criteria, you will be contacted by email to let you know you have been selected along with the invoice. Your participation will be confirmed upon the submission of the fee.

The Polish NGO Forum “Razem” – a platform creating space for multilateral cooperation for non-profit organizations active in the fields of migration and integration, enabling co-creation of solutions for people with refugee and migration experience in Poland and for the Polish society – presents the Voluntary Guidelines on the Nature of Contractual Partnerships between INGOs and L/NNGOs.

The Voluntary Guidelines are the result of the work of the Partnership Working Group, established in March 2023 under the NGO Forum. The Working Group was called for in response to the Open Letter to International Donors And Organizations That Want To Help Ukrainian Refugees In Poland, published by the Polish L/NNGOs in October 2022 and to the broader discussions surrounding the challenges to implementing the localisation agenda in Poland. The Voluntary Guidelines on the Nature of Contractual Partnerships are the result of a series of monthly in-depth discussions – with Polish-English simultaneous translation provided – on topics raised in the Letter and then selected at as the most urgent to build better cooperation between NGOs active inside the Ukraine Refugee Response in Poland. The Voluntary Guidelines include:

  • Core Voluntary Guideline on Transparency And Mutual Respect
  • Voluntary Guideline on Due Diligence
  • Voluntary Guidelines on Funding Cycles
  • Voluntary Guideline on Overhead Costs
  • Voluntary Guidelines on Reporting
  • Voluntary Guidelines on Exit Strategies And Long-Term Strategies

While the Voluntary Guidelines play into the global conversation surrounding localisation of humanitarian aid, they reflect the experience from the ground and were meant to tackle the issues from this specific context in a pragmatic and realistic way, taking into account the responsibility of INGOs and L/NNGOs alike. Nevertheless, they can inform the broader humanitarian community, including UN agencies and humanitarian donors, of the operational challenges and possible solutions coming from Polish practice.

Middle-aged Krishen Kohli lives in the hamlet of Hanif Khanzada, ten kilometres from Tando Jan Mohammad in Mirpur Khas district. He is a landless farmer who works as a labourer for a local landowner. He has six daughters and a son. Their son came at number four. “We wanted a few more sons so we kept at it and all God gave us was another three daughters,” he says with a chuckle.

He owns no property; even the home he lives in is built on the landlord’s land and he makes a very meagre living from his work which is irregular. Krishen believes that a child sent into the world is by the will of God and so it is His job to provide them food. Even if that food is only chilli paste and millet bread? “Yes. The child is fated to have only that much.” Krishen’s faith in kismet is as firm as that of anyone who is very poor and has no control over circumstances. In any case, he knows of no family where the man and wife have lived together for fifteen years or more and have fewer than ten children. As for himself, he says he has had enough. He does not want any more children.

Amidst the flood crisis, Kirshan’s residence suffered extensive damage as a result of the flood. In response, he undertook the task of constructing a new dwelling using locally available materials such as wood and mud. Additionally, Kirshan faced health challenges, prompting him to seek medical assistance from the Mobile Health Unit (MHU) of Community World Service Asia due to the inaccessibility of conventional hospitals. The MHU played a pivotal role in providing relief during these difficult circumstances.

Community World Service Asia’s (CWSA) Mobile Health Unit (MHU) supported by Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD) and Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) was on a follow up visit after the first round. On both occasions Krishen had attended the health awareness session delivered by the CWSA social mobiliser and agrees that he and his wife should have had fewer children.

He was very pleased with the health camp. For the past about seven years, he has had ‘heat in the stomach’, the usual local term for acidity, and constipation but he did not go to the government hospital at Tando Jan Mohammad. Instead, he consulted a private doctor whose fee was PKR 500 (Approx. USD 1.7) and to fill his prescription Krishen parted with PKR 1300 (Approx. USD 4.5). Adding to that the to and fro fare, the cost of the visit went up to PKR 2500 (Approx. USD 8.8). That was beyond the capacity of a poor landless peasant and most of it was taken on loan from the landlord to be adjusted against Krishen’s wages. “The medication lasted me three months and when the course was done, I remained well for another five or six months,” reports the man.

Dismissive of the government facility in Tando Jan Mohammad, Krishen says their free medication never works. Fifteen days earlier, on the first visit of the mobile health unit, he was given five pills, one for a day. And he had never felt better. This was such effective medication, he says, that it has improved his appetite as well. Now he was back for it. The health project had been extended on this very day and the facility was available to the village for more time. If Krishen were to visit the medical practitioner in town in 2023, he estimates he would be set back by about PKR 5000 (Approx. USD 17.6).

Gauri, another fellow resident of Tando Jam, is pregnant with her seventh child and she is not even thirty years old yet. She too has attended the health sessions and heard all about family spacing and that a small family is better fed than a large brood. Like Krishen, she too is not really convinced about a small family being ideal. One can hardly expect that when you live in a social and cultural eco-system that favours huge families.

The first two of Gauri’s babies were delivered by her mother, an experienced midwife. But then she was too old and did not wish to endanger the third child so Gauri went to the government hospital at Tando Jan Mohammad. “The doctor shouted at me, telling me to get back and wait outside. We are poor people and that is how they attend to us,” she complains. She sighs about the expense of coming and going and then being treated badly by the medical staff. After the first visit, she gave up and consulted a private maternity clinic that delivered her next two babies. Each visit delivery cost her PKR 20,000 (Approx. 70).

That put her husband under a huge debt to the landlord and it took a couple of years to repay. In which time Gauri had two more children who were delivered by an inexperienced midwife from a neighbouring settlement. And in September 2023, she was pregnant for the seventh time with plenty of child-bearing years ahead of her!

As useful as it is to treat recurrent scabies and respiratory tract infections – the most common complaints in the area – it is necessary to intensify health sessions on sexual and reproductive health of women and young girls in such areas. There needs to be greater emphasis on post-partum care and nutrition of families, women and children alike. Through this project, community mobilisers and health practitioners have engaged with communities on raising awareness and initiating dialogue on these needs but the focus has largely been on providing immediate health care to flood affected communities suffering from diseases and illnesses or needing maternal and neonatal care. There is definitely space to do more.

Meanwhile, the seventy odd women and men waiting in the shade of the trees outside the mobile health unit were happy that they were getting medication that worked. And it was totally free of cost. For women like Gauri who had only a few minutes earlier shrilly complained that government doctors did not even listen to her and others like her, the medical officer in the health facility was an angel.

Sindh Province in Pakistan has seen a wave of climate-induced disasters and other crises in recent years. Drought, Locust Attacks, the COVID-19 Pandemic, and Flooding, have all left district Umerkot and Sindh’s desert region particularly hard hit. Umerkot in particular is historically prone to moderate droughts and is categorised as highly vulnerable according to the Drought Vulnerability Index. With the support of Australian partners, Community World Service Asia is working to provide essential health and quality education services to communities affected by climate-related issues and displacement in Umerkot.

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We ask you to fill out this global survey regarding the future of humanitarianism.  This survey was put together by a team fromGeorge Washington University, Community World Service Asia (CWSA), and several other partners.  The results of this survey will be presented at the launch of the Regional Humanitarian Partnership Week-Asia Pacific organised by the Asian Disaster Risk Reduction Network (ADRRN), Community World Service Asia (CWSA), The International Council for Voluntary Agencies (ICVA) and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) in Bangkok in December, 2023.  We kindly ask that you fill out the survey by no later than November 30th, 2023. 

If you have questions, please contact Professor Michael Barnett at George Washington University, barnett@gwu.edu.