Pakistan and NGOs
Pakistan is a developing country where NGOs have existed since independence in 1947. NGOs increasingly have worked for rehabilitation and social welfare and serve to the poor and marginalized. Some NGOs in Pakistan have played an important role in creating awareness of issues such as human and legal rights, women in development and overpopulation. Others have provided badly needed services such as basic health care, water and sanitation and employment opportunities to underdeveloped areas by showing their ability to succeed where the Government has had difficulties. NGOs have helped change national perception and policies concerning sustainable development.
Cooperative Societies
Since cooperative have existed and run in many regions of the world to reduce the poverty by involving community to utilize their natural resources and generate their income to become self reliant. Most of the cooperatives have brought dramatically change in the world such as cooperative movement, International Cooperative Alliance, Canadian cooperative foundation and so on so forth. The main purpose of these cooperatives is to bring long-term change in the lives of underprivileged community to sustain and manage their income in every aspect. Pakistan has contrary situation than other countries due to millions of hindrance in running cooperative like bureaucracy, lack of awareness of cooperative, lack of funding, lack of skills required to income generation, poor business planning. Seeing the worst situation foundation of MCS was laid to promote cooperatives in the most deprived area of Pakistan Thar, as model cooperative, which can display the real image and progress of the community.
Manjithi Multi-purpose welfare cooperative society Tharparkar Sindh, Pakistan The cooprative was formed with a mission to support the poor and disadvantaged communities in improving the quality of their lives through encouraging people to organize and mobilize themselves for socio-economic change. MCS was formed with a clear aim to support the underprivileged community and bring about a long term difference to the lives of the most disadvantaged people of Tharparkar, Sindh Province in Pakistan Environment education and Protection is the special concern of the cooprative as majority of the rural community depend on natural resources such as, trees, soil, bushes, wildlife, and water for their livelihood. The degradation in
these resources makes devastating effect on the food security and livelihood of the poor and disadvantaged community. Since people are rain dependant they mostly rely on their lands and livestock The Organization gives Community a major role to play in achieving sustainable development in the protection of Environment and stability in economical conditions by sustainably managing their natural resources and managing their livestock being given livestock management trainings and facilities and include them in self help activities to develop their own resources to survive. The Cooperative puts great emphasis on enhancing the skills of women to generate their income and raise voice to support them in many regions of the Thar , especially in regions of deprived areas where women have little political clout, lack protection for their most basic human rights, are disproportionately undereducated, and are the most economically vulnerable. In many countries, women also face social and cultural barriers to their advancement, including discrimination, having to balance family life with the need or desire to work outside the home, and the biggest barrier of all — illiteracy. Additionally, women are the targets of sexual exploitation, trafficking in persons, and domestic violence.
In most homes, even through the economic conditions are deplorable, women are not allowed to work outside the home. The practice of purdah keeps women homebound with no means of earning an income. Training in appliqué, embroidery and other types of needlework allows these women to work at home. MCS gives handicraft support to women to not only enhance their modern skills to meet modern market but also supports in marketing tools to get optimum outcome through their needle work.

would be very interested to hear of any links you find to green teachers program – a while back I heard that many thousands of children were sharing a common teaching program on water in barzil connected across the river basins of the world’s largest dam at Foz – I dont know if that’s still going

I understand your focus is the opposite extreme of agriculture vocations where there is too little water – this bookmark may be of some interest http://www.searnet.org/about.asp

we are keen to build resources ahead of 10000 rural telecentres coming online to Q&A community sustainability issues including micro agriculture
http://www.egrameen.com/id30.html