Providing employment opportunities to the underserved

Partnering with Akhter Hameed Khan Resource Centre

Code for Pakistan recently signed an MoU with Akhtar Hameed Khan Resource Center to collaborate on initiatives of mutual interest. We are working together to design and develop a job portal for AHKRC, which will benefit the community of Dhok Hassu-Mangtal, and other urban slums. This portal will primarily focus on the low-skilled labour force of Dhok Hassu-Mangtal (and other semi/ low skilled professionals) and will help connect them with potential employers. Development is ongoing and CfP will provide continuous support to AHKRC in deployment and implementation of the job portal.

Here, we talk to the AHKRC team to learn more about the organisation, their work, and what they hope to achieve through the job portal.

Tell us a bit about Akhter Hameed Khan Resource Center

Akhter Hameed Khan Resource Centre is an NGO set up by the late Dr. Akhter Hameed Khan, with a unique bottom-up and participatory approach to development. His philosophy, based on incremental uplifting of the most impoverished communities to enable them to be self-sufficient, has been carried on by his team and is a part of their ethos to date. AHKRC, set up in 2000, is currently working in the sub-urban slums of the twin cities of Rawalpindi and Islamabad.

Why Dhok Hassu?

AHKRC started working at Dhok Hassu Mangtal — an urban slum of Rawalpindi in 2016, their mission being to work in low-income urban settlements to enable them to be self-sufficient. There are multiple reasons why they chose to work within the community of Dhok Hassu.

• Firstly, it is not the poorest of the poor community and it is relatively less challenging to work in such communities. In any poorest of the poor community, survival precedes everything else, which makes it a lot more challenging for long-term initiatives. People look for instant short-term benefits instead of long-term good, which makes interventions less likely to succeed.
• Secondly, it is a good representation of different ethnic communities, primarily Punjabis and Pakhtuns, making up a diverse group of beneficiaries.
• Thirdly, it is a stable community as the rate of migration is as low as 6–7%. On average, a community has been there for 8–10 years, which allows them to document the impact better. Because it is a stable community, it provides a significant critical mass, which is one of the prerequisites for development work.

How is AHKRC helping the community of Dhok Hassu?

Dhok Hassu is an undocumented economy. Almost 75% of people are earning between PKR 25,000–35,000 a month. However, 37% of people are either unemployed or underemployed. And only 3% of women are allowed to work outside their house. Currently, there are 26,000 people looking for jobs. This is an excellent opportunity for AHKRC to set up their interventions and empower these people through economic opportunities. They are supporting illiterate or less literate people to get jobs in the mainstream market, as either they lack a platform to access jobs or are incapable of doing it on their own. The AHKRC team collects data based on their skill sets, identifies specific jobs for them and connects them to potential employers.

Tell us a bit about some of your past interventions

In the past AHKRC’s interventions were completely health-focused, though there was an element of entrepreneurship then as well. The very first grant they applied for was for the Punjab Government’s Punjab Population Innovation Fund. Out of 1,600 applicants, they were one among the selected three. This project chiefly entailed awareness raising and social mobilisation on family planning and reproductive health. They were able to enrol 7,600 couples into the family planning program, and engaged several women as social mobilisers who went door-to-door educating men and women and sold health care/reproductive care products. This was a good learning as well as an earning opportunity for these women, who later on continued with this work even after the project came to an end.

What are the major projects you are currently working on?

Currently, AHKRC is running three main initiatives:

• Men development program: Connecting potential labour to different organisations within Islamabad and Rawalpindi.
• Garment value chain for women: Creating a source of income for women through garment production by employing women from Dhok Hassu. Whatever they earn from this initiative will be used to sustain this project. This is one of their revenue generation strategies.
• Digital education: Providing computer literacy as well as private tuition for young children in Dhok Hassu. They have also equipped the place with a library and learning centre where children read and learn free of cost.

What prompted you to build a job portal for the Dhok Hassu community?

Previously we used to manually collect data from the potential labour force and then connected them with prospective employers. However, this practice was too labour intensive. There was a lot of reliance on manual paperwork and a lot of back and forth with employers. Soon we understood that we won’t be able to carry on with this in the long run and that we needed an efficient mechanism to do this. Consequently, we came up with the idea of developing a job portal for this tier of labour. This isn’t a novel idea, as there are many job portals in the market such as Rozee, Britespyre, Indeed, Linkedin etc. However, within this community where we work, people are not literate enough to access these portals. Therefore, having a dedicated job portal, moderated by our team, for people who are looking for blue-collar jobs is essential to provide them with access to employers in the mainstream market, as well as to make their job search more efficient. Once this portal is ready, on one hand our team will collect data from the candidates, and on the other, organisations will register themselves with us and will post jobs on our portal. We will act as the middle-man for both our stakeholders.

We are well aware of the challenges that come with developing a portal like this, as we have seen many other portals all over the world, and it is particularly challenging to moderate such portals for low-income groups, especially in the Asian context. But we are here to try our luck and make this work.

Why did you choose to partner with Code for Pakistan?

We believe that Code for Pakistan has a strong sense of civic engagement that resonates well with our work. This gives us a lot of confidence to trust the organisation and take the first step toward what could be a potential long-term partnership which is citizen-centred and aims at bringing the best out of individuals and communities.

What’s the vision?

We envision this as a step towards the urban slums becoming self-sufficient, where people have access to the resources they need. We believe poverty eradication cannot be through regular dole-outs. We must enable people to stand on their own two feet in the long run. Therefore, our approach is not short-term interventions, but long-lasting positive social impact. We want to see urban centres as thriving self-sufficient spaces where resources are connectable and shareable.

“We are experimental and this is an idea that’s worked very well for professionals and educated people. It’s also working informally very well for the people who play the role of a middle man. We are trying to mix the best of the educated peoples’ system for the efficiency of this informal system.We don’t know if it will work or not but we want to try. Our biggest strength is that we try things and we learn from our failures and then we modify our next approach.”

Dr. Ayesha Khan - CEO, AHKRC

Written by: Farah Samuel

Farah is a development practitioner with keen interest in research, writing and climate action. She looks after programs and partnerships at Code for Pakistan and can be reached at farah@codeforpakistan.org or https://www.linkedin.com/in/farah-n-samuel/