What keeps a household earning is the reason PPAF was created. In the nineties, the state built schools and water schemes in the villages and left the villages to run them, and the country learnt the words ghost school and ghost water scheme. The Government of Pakistan set up PPAF in 1997, with the World Bank’s support, to try the opposite order: organise the households first, and let them decide what to build. A community organisation of 15 or 20 households keeps a register and a savings box and argues about what it needs first; it puts in its own share, in labour if it has nothing else, since a poor man, as we tell them, can still swing a shovel. Village bodies federate into a local support organisation that can sit across a table from a district officer. There are 171,350 of these institutions today, with 2.67 million members, 63 per cent of them women, and through them come the water scheme, the school, and the protection wall that make a gain hold. They have built more than 35,000 schemes without a contractor, and 82 per cent of the households they serve report that their scheme is regularly maintained. PPAF itself was built to last. Eight of its 12 board members are elected from civil society, academia, and the professions; since it opened its doors........

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