Jaroka is a Tele-Medicine initiative that is the brainchild of Atif Mumtaz of Personforce / Brightspyre. The project has been running as a pilot in Skardu and Mardan for two years, and have received a number of awards and recognition in the past.

They just announced that they have received funding from the USAID and HEC to expand beyond the pilot into a full-out 2-year implementation in Mardan. My sources tell me that its in the range of US$300,000.

Here’s a description of what they have been doing, from when Atif was a runner-up for the DHL YES! (Young Social Entrepreneur) award.

The premise of their project is to connect rural healthcare centers with doctors in major cities or internationally for advise and remote consultation via the internet.

With partnership from stakeholders such as APPNA, COMSATs and Digital Vision Program, and even Stanford University, the project has conducted a pilot project of the system in Skardu. COMSATS provided them a dedicated satellite connection in Skardu and medical professionals for the test. Atif’s team provided the open-source telemedicine system.

The system itself used a stored-and-forward approach to telemedicine to coordinate and get feedback from specialists in the US.

Their results show that 2000 patients visited the center in the first two-year pilot period, where 77% of the cases were specialist dermatological cases for which specialist doctors had not been available in Skardu at that time.

I think these people are doing a great cause and showing the social benefits of leveraging IT technology for advancing the human spirit and cause. For more about their project (their research results about the systems are pretty interesting) read here.

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Ok here’s something that bothers me quite a bit - its good to see that some corporations are atleast trying to be more "socially responsible", but have next to no appreciation for some of the very creative and impressive ways in which they actually can do that.

Typically most "socially responsible" activities that companies end up participating in could be categorized under:

• Charity - e.g. "We’re going to donate schoolbooks to XYZ number of schools for kids"
• Greenery - "Look, we’re planting trees!"
• Healthcare Improvement - "We’ll go out and give vaccinations to XYZ number of people"
• Education - Again its schoolbooks, or schoolbags, or something or the other related to this.

This might seem fine at first but there is just one problem: Every company - regardless of size or type of work - is doing projects in the same types of areas. (with exceptions - will talk about them later).

Wake up! This is NOT corporate social responsibility!
Read more…

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I started exploring a line of thought earlier with a Question: Why should companies care about anyway? Since then I’ve been writing about somewhat morbid news that has inadvertently been related to company decisions.

Its true that corporations only have a single responsibility: To keep the interests of their stakeholders in mind. But what they need to realize is that there more stakeholders in their operations than just the shareholders.

You are actually the most important stakeholder because you - as a citizen, businessman, or otherwise member of society - influence the reasons for which that company exists to begin with. If you weren’t a consumer, there wouldnt be demand for products. Demand in turn influences regulatory policy, which in turn influences the business environment that attracts companies to offer products and services to consumers. The corporations, then, must in-turn use their corporate machinery to create a societal environment which allows you to continue living your life successfully which would in turn fuel more demand from those companies.

Companies are grossly misguided about their CSR when (1) they forget the environment and the people that allowed them to exist and (2) they assume that the responsibility stops right after that consumer transaction (of buying something from you) ends.

Why should companies care about you? Because their business depends on stable demand from a market of consumers or customers. The best way to create stable demand, then, is infact to focus strategic corporate resources on creating the society and the environment which fuels that demand.

Over the next few weeks I want to start elaborating some of the points from this post more.

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MKR Foundation- is a non-profit organization strictly focused on creating innovative environment for socio-economic benefits and making way for a new vision of corporate social responsibility (CSR). They are working in partnership with Jang Group and Geo TV and have access to over 10 million thinking people.

MKR has recently taken a remarkable environmental protection initiative by the name of “SABZ” (formally start in August 2008). SABZ is a three years program (2008-2010), with a mission to create awareness, motivation, and will to bring an effective environmental change via bouquet of campaigns. It will not only help in developing environmental friendly communities at different levels, but provide a platform to the entire stakeholder to exchange ideas on continuous basis and forming National Environmental Think Tank (NET). The stakeholders for this project include Govt and public sector, Development sector, Legislators, Judicial System, Political Leadership, Religious groups, Law Enforcing Agencies, Corporate Sector, Media, Academia, Children & Youth, and Women etc. Some of the expected activities for phase 2008 are Sabz discussion Forums, Corporate Sector conferences, Workshops for Law Enforcing Agencies, innocent garden, green campuses, environmental quiz, children painting competitions, Film making, amateur photography, music challenge etc. All of these activities are designed to engage society members in playing an active role in saving the environment.

Hats off to MKR for taking such a wonderful step for environmental protection, since it is necessary in bringing the positive change in all nation building agendas. ….. Stay in touch for more updates on SABZ…

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We all strongly agree that the internet is a gateway to the information but is this information equally accessible to all ??? I never really thought about this accessibility issue until I met Special Talent Exchange Programme (STEP) team. STEP (www.step.org.pk ) is a renowned organization which was conceived and launched by persons with disabilities themselves with the prime objective to raise their voice at all level initiating from the grassroots to state and international level.

During our meeting I learned that one of the major challenges/issues faced by People With Disabilities (PWD) is web accessibility. Most of the developed countries are sensitive enough to the needs of PWDs and have successfully implemented strict rules and regulation in order to provide justice with this issue, but developing countries like ours seems to have no care attitude. Very few websites are developed using W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. This of course is extremely disappointing.

Following is the summary of Jonathan Snook thoughts on “What does accessibility mean”:

“As a web professional, I try to build sites that reach the largest audience possible. Every design decision has a consequence and those consequences have to be weighed against the goals of the site. Accessibility is just usability after all. We’re not designing and building these sites for ourselves, we’re doing it for other people, too. While it may seem easier to just ignore whole segments of the population, for the vast majority of us building web sites, we already have the tools and knowledge out there. So, let me try and boil this down into some bullet points:

• Accessibility is usability. We’re all just trying to make things that people can use.
• Basic accessibility isn’t hard. We should be doing stuff like alt-text, making sure form fields are labelled, etc.
• Don’t expect perfection. It’s possible to get it wrong, especially as more layers of interactivity is added. It’s not a bad thing. Just learn from it.
• Just because we can’t, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t. By this I mean, just because we might not be able to cater to everybody doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it at all.

– Jonathan Snook, What does accessibility mean, snook.ca, November 27, 2007

The United Nation estimates that some 600 million people worldwide have disability and the vast majority of disable people live in low and middle income countries. The proportion of disabled in Pakistan as per census of 1998 is 2.49 percent of total population, which is quite diverse from estimates of World Bank, UN , WHO. Classification of disable population by different categories of disabilities shows that proportions of people with seeing disabilities are highest among disabled followed by movement and hearing disabilities. These statistics clearly convey us that making the website accessible will not only help the PWDs by providing them access to and sharing of information but will definitely be a positive factor in reducing the barrier to unemployment , illiteracy and poverty.

After all it’s our social and ethical responsibility to provide equal opportunities at no additional cost.

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Babar Bhatti at TelecomPK and Tee Emm both covered Telecon 2008 that was held in Karachi just recently.

One of the talks, made by Mobilink CEO Zohair Khaliq was noted by them in their reviews. Particularly interesting was this information from Babar:

Consider the recent presentation by Zouhair Khaliq, CEO of Mobilink at TeleCON 2008 event in Karachi. The title of his presentation was Mobilizing Social Change and he talked about the recent launch of Mobilink Foundation.

Tee Emm was not impressed by the corporate brochure readout by Zouhair. However Bilal Mughal thought that there were positive aspects in Zouhair’s presentation. He writes this at Telecom Grid Pakistan:

Industry revenues are based on these mainstream factors and eliminating poverty is the heartbeat of all the problem whether it comes to you in the form of purchasing power or uplifitng the life trends from one consumer sect to another (higher). These things grow to be a central part of your company plans especially in our GDP environment and rotating them around different conferences provides with the direction to other participants to target the source issue of the market because at the end of the day if I sell dialup connection I would not want to sell at 2Rs if I’m selling at 5 today and you can only do that by increasing the consumer power at various levels and keeping it stable.

 

While I wont debate the validity of that presentation (since I wasnt present) but I’ll be sharing some excerpts form the U.N. Foundation and Vodafone report on the same topic which has several interesting case studies. Stay tuned!

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NUST Institute of Information Technology , now known as NUST School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (SEECS) has taken another initiative of introducing “Volunteer Me portal” under its NSEC club….. Volunteer Me is a joint effort by SEECS and Association of Development of Pakistan (ADP) California chapter.

The objective of this portal is to render opportunities for those who are making the difference and those who wants to make the difference. It will help various non-profit organizations and NGOs to define the volunteering opportunities and a customized way for volunteers to find out these opportunities. In few weeks time, we (NSEC) will be launching its first version and require some links of NGO’s and other non-profit organization…..We will be updating our progress on the blog.

Following are some of the screen shots of Volunteer Me.

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This is a guest post by Qazi Atiq from the Green & White fame.

This is something I have been wanting to write about for some time. Every now and then some multinational starts a campaign to do something amazing for the society IF the consumers start buying their products in more quantities,

The most recent of these type of campaign is of P&G Pakistan, they made a very nice add of showing happy children saying ‘main pilot banna chahta hoon’ (I want to become a pilot) and ‘mein doctor banna chahta hoon’ (I want to become a doctor) and the last child they show is on a bed in a hospital with oxygen mask and the back ground voice says ‘aur mein …..’ (and what about me …..)

The ad is excellent touches you deep inside. But the last thing they show just makes you think if all of this was just to increase their sales, in the last clip they show all their products and say “Buy more of these products and help P&G donate life saving equipment to children hospitals around the country”, this last piece just washes the image they have built in the a — why are they tying the helping of society by increasing their sales? Aren’t they making enough profit already from this society to donate some of it back to it, wouldn’t it be better if they would just have said we have donated this amount of equipment to these hospitals around the nation, that would have compelled me to go out and buy more of their products but this where they say increase our sales and we will help the community this is something which repelled me from them, and the fact that this ad was shown repeatedly on all major channels on radio frequently, I just wondered how much did they spent on the advertisement, if they only had spent that money which they threw around advertising on actually buying the equipment for hospitals it would have been better.

Another recent example was Nilaam.pk which said that they would donate to charity if people signed up. Osama has said this about the issue back then:

If you want to help underprivileged children, and have access to helping them, then help them! When society sees how nice and kind you are, they will immediately feel attracted to you and thus tend to sign up for your services that much more.

And this is not just one time… multinationals have been doing this for some time now, I still remember Arial washing powder donating 1 rs for each packet you buy to schools and showing that on a 15 minute long program (imagine the cost) showing Anwar Maqsood going to different schools around the country donating black boards and chairs, but still that was better we could actually see some activity being done with the money they were raising from the increased sales.

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This is a news item from last week that made me pause and think about the type of world we’re living in.

A 27 year old man hanged himself from a ceiling fan after apparently being harassed by loan recovery staff from MCB after a loan payment was delayed.

I’m saying "apparently" because that hasnt been proven yet, and the truth is that loan recovery staff really does seem like an easy person to blame (it makes a good story, and the newspapers live on… but more on their responsibilities later).

I also dont think MCB could have ever predicted this either because most of their loan / credit-card related operations are outsourced to subcontractors to protect them from precisely the type of legal catastrophe this can potentially become.

 

But even if they are protected legally, it does start a debate on the responsibility of corporations giving our loans. Adnan Siddiqui thinks its not directly MCBs fault as much as it is the fault of the entire environment the system has created around people who werent prepared for it.

I agree, but I would hold MCB and the rest of the banks responsible as well. There were a LOT of defaulters on car finances - so much so that I’m told that the best "business" to be in these days is care recovery for banks, or resale of used (recovered) cars back to cash-paying consumers.

 

Both of these trends stemmed from the radically irresponsible ads started by banks, spearheaded most by MCB — which made the grave mistake of showing credit to be synonymous to money in the bank. We were forced to watch people buy cars, guitars, education, weddings, jewelry, honeymoons, even childbirth using credit cards (sigh!)

Dr. Adil Najam from ATP argued this almost two years ago. Back in August 2006, he had said the following:

I, of course, have no objections to newspapers selling advertising or to advertisers making whatever ads they want. That is their right.

But it is also my right, and our duty, to point out the silliness - and in this case dangers - of the social messaging contained in some ads.

I have long argued that the emergence of a true and well-managed market for credit is amongst the most important things for Pakistan’s future economic progress, because it will level the economic playing field and enhance both opportunity and choice. Having said that, credit is a tricky commodity and needs to be handled - and marketed - with care.

Even in advanced industrialized economies it can go out of hand — in the US total consumer debt is now nearly US$1 Trillion and can lead to countless wrecked lives.

But, back to Pakistan. The type of aggressive — some will say ruthless — advertising of credit that could lead to immense personal tragedy in the future.

I just wish it could have been reversed before that tragedy really did occur.

But what type of responsibilities does this create for the banks - can we come up with some sort of a framework to study this?

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Here’s a question for all of you - why should companies be bothered with social responsibility anyway?

All corporations are private organizations whose only connection with society comes from the business or professional transactions they perform. They transact with their customers and consumers, they pay taxes and work with trade organizations or on legal policy matters which affect their industry.

The work they do, the people they employ, the products they launch, the types of people they reach out to - ultimately doesnt each of these impact society or the economy in one way or another?

Why do people then expect companies (particularly large corporations) to spend additional resources towards Social Responsibility? What does this expectation stem from - is it because we dont like seeing corporations make seemingly obscene amounts of profits?

Milton Friedman famously argued this in 1983 when he said:

"there is one and only one social responsibility of business - to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition, without deception or fraud"

In other words, a company has no special moral or social obligations. Your thoughts on this?

Please add yours and then I’ll try to add some as well in a few days.

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