CARE Pakistan’s Programming
(Updated March 2014)
CARE Pakistan’s History: Following an assessment of the underlying causes of poverty in 2002, CARE decided to open a country office in Pakistan. The office officially opened in June 2005 with the original intent of addressing deep-rooted poverty in Southern Punjab and Northern Sindh (i.e. the Seraiki belt areas) by strengthening civil society and the link between poor communities and local government; raising the voice of the poor through advocacy; and strengthening institutions to improve poverty reduction efforts. However a few months after opening, CARE became fully engaged in and all its resources focused on responding to the devastating Kashmir earthquake. In 2010, CARE Pakistan revised it Long Range Strategic Plan (LRSP 2011-2026) and decided to focus on four programming areas: Health, Education, Economic Empowerment and Emergency.
CARE Programming: CARE’s program in Pakistan will have the overall goal of facilitating changes so that in 15 years (2011-2026), 28 million marginalized women in Pakistan are making choices that reduce vulnerability and impact their lives positively. These women will have control over productive assets and are able to exercise their rights in formal and informal decision-making process at all levels.
CARE’s strategy aims to facilitate change in four specific programming areas:
• Health
• Education
• Economic Empowerment
• Emergency
Through these four specific programming areas, CARE Pakistan is helping women and girls to ‘LIVE, LEARN & EARN’. In each area CARE will focus on specific objectives (domains of change) and target key breakthroughs (sustainable changes) through specific interventions (pathways of change).
Health: CARE Pakistan is working with partners and local authorities to raise awareness about and improve access to sexual and reproductive health services. In addition, primary health care is a key component of our emergency response in the country.
In Pakistan, our key programming objectives in health are to:
• Improve the access of women and girls to reproductive health services by overcoming discrimination from customary laws and practices;
• Improve the availability of quality health service delivery for poor women
Education: CARE Pakistan has been engaged in post-disaster education rehabilitation in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, in the wake of conflict, an earthquake and floods. We are directly supporting reconstruction, and also working with local NGOs, community-based organizations (CBOs), and authorities to encourage rehabilitation of destroyed education infrastructure.
In Pakistan, our programming in education targets the following objectives:
• Overcome discriminatory attitudes and practices towards girls and women’s education;
• Improve the quality and standards of education service delivery to the poor.
Economic Empowerment: CARE Pakistan is working to enable women to gain confidence to work outside the home, earn an income, acquire necessary life skills, generate start-up capital, and initiate entrepreneurial activities.
Our 15-year objectives for the economic empowerment of Pakistani women are to:
· Enhance life-skills and vocational training opportunities for women.
· Improve legal and regulatory protection of productive resources (through inheritance rights), workplace wage equity, and domestic worker rights;
· Promote gender-sensitive reform of land rights and tenancy laws.
Emergency: Responding to emergencies is an essential part of CARE’s work to fight poverty and injustice. CARE helps people cope with crisis through disaster risk reduction, emergency relief, preparedness and post-crisis recovery. The primary objective of CARE’s humanitarian response is to meet immediate needs of affected populations in the poorest communities in the world.
CARE’s emergency programming in Pakistan will aim to:
• Reach vulnerable and marginal communities;
• Promote women’s rights;
• Support advocacy to ensure that institutions are responsive, inclusive, and foster a just and equitable society.