The Impact of Human Capital on Improving Sustainable Rural Livelihood Using System Dynamics Approach

Sustainable livelihood was introduced in the 1980s as a new approach to rural development to reduce and eradicate rural poverty. Achieving sustainable rural livelihoods is not possible without considering the rural livelihood assets. To understand the consequences of a change in the rural livelihood system, comprehensive and interactions-based approaches are needed to understand the complicated interactions and feedback between different factors. Accordingly, in this study, an integrated System Dynamics (SD) model was developed for sustainable rural livelihood analysis in the eastern villages of Qarabagh Ghazni, Afghanistan, where managing rural development is seriously challenging due to population growth. SD is a strong and effective approach to examine the behavior of complex systems over time. Findings illustrated that the population in the study area was increasing and the average annual population growth rate was +2.94%. Also, a significant proportion of this population was illiterate. Therefore, it seems that the requirement for skills training in this area will be higher due to population growth. An effective step can be taken to achieve sustainable rural development by increasing the skills and the desire of young people to be self-employed in rural areas. The results also showed that, by increasing per capita income in this region, the tendency to stay in the rural areas increased during the simulation period. Therefore, the government should pay special attention to increasing the household's income in order to prevent migration of the people and strengthen the desire to stay in the rural areas. The results of this research support the idea that there is the necessary potential in terms of human resources in this region to reduce poverty and improve the living conditions of people.