Agriculture and Rural Development

Agriculture is the main livelihood for roughly 75 percent of the Afghan population. The growth of the agriculture sector is crucial for national food security and is a major economic driver for the entire country. The agriculture sector expanded by 18.2 percent in 2012, after two years of decline during 2010-11. Our principal aim is to ensure client satisfaction through our associate teaming partners’ delivery of good quality services. DS can respond to any client’s needs in a timely manner and provide satisfactory services within the specified budget.

We are providing agricultural services in the following areas:

Irrigation – Managing A Scarce Resource
Land Management – Shaping The Future
Rural Development – Integrating The Poor
Skills Development in Agriculture

Agriculture – Stimulating Growth

DS has contributed to empirical evidence that, given the right incentives, investments, and policies, agriculture’s environmental footprint can be lessened in order to protect watersheds and safeguard biodiversity. DS’s approach to raising agricultural productivity is based on several pillars, briefly highlighted below.

With regards to promoting efficient agricultural services, DS focuses on developing and strengthening food and non-food value chains in agribusiness. We provide in-depth analysis and sound advice with regard to effective trade and market policies. Efficient land markets are a cornerstone of raising productivity. DS’s approach to irrigation reflects the principles of integrated water resource management as well as participatory irrigation management.

Irrigation – Managing A Scarce Resource

DS offers services throughout the entire project cycle, from feasibility studies to the implementation of irrigation projects, specific support services such as the set-up of water user groups, training of maintenance service providers, and evaluations. We promote holistic approaches including water harvesting, water quality treatment, irrigation, drainage, and reuse as essential parts of water management. Other services are related to organizing water user groups and cooperatives, water management, negotiation of by-laws, and the maintenance of irrigation infrastructure.

Land Management – Shaping The Future

Secure land tenure and land rights transactions are key

aspects of responsible land administration and transparent land markets. DS assists its partners in designing and implementing specific land administration systems for responsible land governance. Given the complexity of land management, DS teams offer multi-disciplinary consultancy services that combine developing policies and institutional arrangements with decentralization, rural economic development, and environmental conservation.

Rural Development – Integrating The Poor

Sustainable development in rural areas requires a comprehensive and cross-cutting approach to achieve “pro-poor” and “green” growth. Because of the variety of natural and human resource conditions, there can be no blueprints. DS concepts are therefore based on sound and specific situational analyses. DS Services, selecting from a diversity of state-of-the-art tools and methods, are tailor-made packages of interventions that best meet rural development needs. Depending on the situation, the services we offer are modular combinations of several of the following intervention options.

Poverty reduction and social development
Environment and natural resources
Territorial development
Economic development

Skills Development in Agriculture

DS applies a collaborative approach to agricultural development and technical and vocational education and training (TVET) to cater for the specific needs of the largely non-formalized agricultural sector. Our interventions cover a wide range from short training courses to long-term design and reform processes of formalized TVET systems. We aim at integrating any form of agricultural training and education into the educational system of a country by applying selected tools from a comprehensive set of services such as:

Conceptual support for policies and sector frameworks;
Professional human capacity development of advisors, teachers, trainers and educational managers;
Design of target-oriented delivery modes, e.g. classroom and etc;
Inducement of modern learning approaches;
Establishment and review of national qualification frameworks and recognition of prior learning mechanisms;
Development and review of skills and occupational standards, curricula, and training programs.

Brochure_Agriculture_and_Rural_Development_2020