Lahore

Drove down to Lahore this morning at seven. Ansa and I are to spend the week training the field staff and surveying 240 clients. All the details including today’s agenda were worked out and confirmed last week, or so I thought. We arrived at 1pm, sat around for an hour waiting for lunch, then were informed that the district project manager would not be returning to the office until five…

That was yesterday. We did finally meet and orientate the DPM and now everything seems to be flowing well as can be today. We’re six staff in total scattered in two different clusters on the western rim of Lahore near the river Ravi. We (excluding me of course) are conducting interviews in homes and businesses of clients including two beauty salons, one auto repair shop, and a few assorted shops and store fronts. The going is very slow. Each survey takes at least 15 minutes. If all the clients were lined up in one place, then there’d be no problems. But instead they’re scattered, or if we’re lucky clustered in various neighborhoods across the city. And even when there are several or more living in close proximity, there is still the issue of getting the word out and bringing them to one place. Too much time is spent waiting and/or traveling.

Nonetheless, we’re gonna stick to the plan. Survey 240 sddncf clients in Lahore and deploy explicitly to support them, but the bigger question is why stick to the plan when the plan is obviously not the ideal case scenario, or even close.

The simplest answer is that i made a promise that the PULS pilot would be in direct support of SDDNCF. But if it turns out that implementation is too cumbersome and tangible outcomes are not precisely defined or forecasted as they are not in this case, then it becomes hard to justify perseverance just for the sake of a promise.

The other reason to push forward with the SDDNCF deployment regardless of inefficiencies is the availability of data. All these clients are already registered and assessed with a poverty scorecard. A “rich baseline” already exists for them, as they say in the industry, ironically. And since I am now part of that data driven industry whether i like it or not, and my final evaluation of the pilot needs to be as qualitative as possible, I have little choice but to persist where the data exist.

In the ideal world, we wouldn’t rely on a single arbitrary criterion (child rescue) for the original intervention (grants or trainings) but instead would do what NRSP does best and apply the standard SM model to the city: basic three-tiered social mobilization, starting at the living community level. Choose the focal points – self identifying activists and community leaders – then build the organizational structure around them and their already existing social capital and exemplary leadership. Thats pretty much exactly how it works in all of nrsp’s rural settings so why not apply the same model here? The answer is we would like to, but SDDNCF is no the vehicle. For one it’s strapped with government mandated formulas mentioned above and two there is very limited time and staff. The sddncf plug is being pulled in june2011 because of (what else!) a shift in the party in power at the provincial level and therefore a sacking of all the original administrators as well as incomplete scrapping of the original publi private partnership model.

So for today, nothing to do but blaze ahead uncertainly with the as is plan.

The below picture is DPM Rezzac diligently interviewing beautician training ladies here in Ali Pura katchi abadi, Lahore, Pakistan. Meanwhile I sit idly moving my thumbs sporadically on this ridiculously inept device. The stuttering slow phone. But at least it gives me an excuse to blaaaaaaagh.

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