Impact of Community Development in Poverty Reduction: Reflections of Azad Jammu and Kashmir Community Development Program

This has always been the dream of development thinkers to contribute in materializing the goal of sustainable development with maximum possible equity. It has become a challenging question whether development programs are really contributing in the welfare of masses and if so, what sort of policy messages can be taken from such success stories? In this connection, present study investigates the impact of Azad Jammu and Kashmir Community Development Program (AJKCDP) in multidimensional perspectives, while using both secondary and primary data to be collected through stratified purposive random sample of 560 respondents from four districts of AJ&K. Adjusted class of FGT measure was employed to estimate the incidence, depth and severity of poverty in absolute and relative framework. It was found that there are varying reflections of incidence, depth and severity of poverty across the sub-groups. Beside unidimensional poverty, multidimensional deprivation was also quantified for all registered and non-registered members of AJKCDP under different arbitrary weight arrangements. Most of such empirics clearly demonstrate the fact that multidimensional poverty was reduced in a higher proportion among the members as compared to non& members; whereas health dimension has been emerged as the leading contributor in multidimensional poverty in AJK. One key policy message emerges that no intervention can be sustainably workable and highly successful in improving the welfare of the masses until health related issues are addressed in conjunction with other development initiatives including institutional development.