deleted deleted Manager   •   over 8 years ago

No Poverty - Akhter Hameed Foundation

No Poverty. Inner city slums are home to around 30% of Pakistani population or around 60-70 million people. They live close to many civic amenities and yet they cant access them. Cities dont recognise many urban slums and therefore under-count their residents, often by 50-90%. Hence even when public sector provides resources, they are insufficient and inadequate. Furthermore the quality is poor because these residents have little or no say in the conduct of these services or their planning or enforcement. All of these start to improve when these residents start to improve their incomes - either by directly buying services or influencing local officials to provide better services. So the key pathway is higher income of inner city residents. There are a number or options:

Bottom of the pyramid marketing for locally needed service. These 70 million people (around 20 million households) spend around Rs. 20,000 a month on household expenses (HIES 2014) - that means that even a small place like Dhok Hassu spends around RS. 1-1.5 billion a month on food, education and other commodities. Can local businesses develop that supply these services at low margin but high scale. That would generate employment in communities (specially for women and those who cant travel easily to work) and reduce the cost of living for residents of these communities.

While there are many un- or under employed men and some women, there is little available to connect them to city markets. Can there be portals or other electronic networking mechanisms to connect potential employers to employees.