Orangi slum transformed by street committees and small loans

Orangi is Karachi's largest slum, long considered a no-go, no-hope area. The Orangi Pilot Project was established in 1980 to fill the gap left by the city's incompetent government, which had failed to provide the slum with sanitation. The Orangi Pilot Project organised local people into street committees and lent them money to buy the raw material to build their own sewerage.

The man behind the Orangi Pilot Project is Akhtar Hameed Khan, a grand old maverick who helped to establish a co-operative movement in Bangladesh when it was East Pakistan. He left after he was accused of being a CIA agent. In Pakistan he has recently been hounded on a trumped-up blasphemy charge.

Thanks to the Orangi Pilot Project, over 72,000 of Orangi's 95,000 houses are connected to covered sewers. The national average is one house in five. The costs have been low: $34 for each house, on top of the voluntary labour provided by locals. The total costs have been slightly over $1.5m, with the Orangi Pilot Project chipping in about $100,000 in research, design and overhead costs. Had the government undertaken the project, it would have cost at least seven times as much.

The results have been remarkable. Sanitation, combined with the Orangi Pilot Project's health project, has brought the district's infant mortality down from 130 per 1,000 in 1982, to 37 in 1991. Nationally, the figure is 95 per 1,000.

The Orangi Pilot Project has branched out from sewerage into health, housing, education and banking. It has been borrowing money from the World Bank and lending it to local people, in lumps of around $1,500, for small businesses ranging from clothing makers to electricity distributors using small generators. Its loan repayment rate is 98 per cent.

Impressed by the project's success, the government, along with international aid agencies, is trying to replicate it on other parts of the country. But although they can copy the model, they cannot replicate the inspiring Mr Khan.