On What I'm Doing

Wow. It's been a bit since I last posted and the weeks are flying by. After a month of living with a family in a tiny apartment and searching for a place I've finally moved into a new apartment with my flat-mate, which is quite a relief. What's especially nice is that, just as in San Francisco, I am able to walk to work from my apartment. Although it's only an 8-minute walk it's highly entertaining as I'm just one of the many parts of traffic here in Ahmedabad: Waterbuffalow, bicycles, Ox, Motorcyles, buses, cows, cars, scooters, pedestrians, rickshaws, stray dogs (so many stray dogs), kids in school uniforms, veggie and fruit wallahs, and the occasional camel all share the road with meon my way to work. And just so you know, my neighborhood is considered a slower residential area.

On top of finally moving my projects at work have taken form and are already keeping me busy. I’ve been ridiculously impressed with my NGO and my colleagues, and am happy to report that the organization I’m with is not one that suffers from inefficiency. My office is a really pleasant place to be: lots of natural light, lots of busy people coming in and out of meetings with community members, tea is served twice a day, lunch is like a big potluck (everyone shares their food, which I love!), and all in all I generally feel like I’m surrounded by productive and interesting people who enjoy their work. I felt the same way about my work in San Francisco, and have decided that as long as I work in an office, it is a pattern I plan to replicate.

So about the NGO itself and my projects: The short of it is that Saath has been working in Ahmedabad’s informal sector since the late 80s. As the country, state, and city has changed around them, so too have their programs/initiatives. All their programs are aimed at improving the standard of living and quality of life of slum residents through health, education, and livelihood schemes, and they’ve also done lots of infrastructure work in partnership with the gov’t. They’ve had a lot of success and what I’ve been most impressed by is their philosophy in using the market as a tool for development (many NGOs are resistant to this concept). The best example of this is a program they initiated 2 years ago, and I’ll try to describe it without going into too many details:

Gujarat (the state I live in) and Ahmedabad (the city I live in) are among the fastest growing areas in India (both in terms of private investment in the area and population). While Ahmedabad has always had a large industrial sector it now has a large and growing service sector. In response to this Saath did a market scan to understand what the changing employment sector and the necessary skills for employment look like. From that they've set up a number of specific job-skill training programs for 18-30 yr. old slum residents, and all the programs (which are split up depending on the sector of employment) include a life-skill module and computer literacy training. They go through this 3-month program and are fed into a corporation/company/etc., and their progress is monitored. Saath has set up centers all around the city, and through the program they’ve already trained and employed close to 2,000 youth, all of whom are from the slums and had dropped out of school. What’s interesting is that the program is not free of charge to the youth (they pay about 500 Rupees for the training – a bit over 10 US dollars), so they are paying for the service that they receive, which gives them a sense of ownership over and commitment to their own success. The idea is that otherwise it’s seen as a charity being given to them, which, it’s been argued, can be dis-empowering.

The project is called “Umeed” (which means Hope), and is only one of the many initiatives that Saath employs. I’m currently working on a grant proposal for this project as one of my smaller short-term projects, so it’s been really great to get an understanding of all the little details that went into starting and creating the program. In the back of my mind I’m constantly wondering whether and how successful projects I come across could be implemented in different contexts (e.g. Bay Area, Iran), or what it is about a given context that allows it to be successful. One thing for sure about this project is that it is a response to the growing economy (so the economic growth and changing labor force are assumed). It’s refreshing to be learning about a project that has successfully used economic growth to reach the bottom of the barrel, and NOT as a trickle down effect but as a proactive initiative that focuses specifically on involving the urban poor in the city’s growth and involves partners at the corporate (employers), state (the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation has already agreed to scale up the project), and civil society level (NGO partners are helping to implement the program). I feel strongly that NGO work should never excuse or completely alleviate the government of it’s social obligations, so when an NGO comes up with something innovative (which involves the private sector to boot) and the government is able to then scale it up (in this case by adding centers all around the city), that’s pretty much an ideal cooperative approach in my mind.

On top of this short-term project I have something I’m working on in the long-term and medium-term as well. My long term project is with one of Saath’s newer initiatives, called the Urban Resource Centers, where I’m working on a report about how the creation of the URCs exemplifies a rights-based-approach to development. In it’s most basic form the purpose of the Urban Resource Centers is to serve as a facilitator between service users and service providers, but it’s a lot more intricate than that (especially in a rights-based context) and will require a post of its own at a later time. What’s great is that the URC team is made up of really interesting people (an urban planner, and an architect who focuses on housing for the poor, to name two), so I’m learning a ton from them along the way.

The medium-term project that I’m working on, which is technically “on the side”, is helping the Community Video Unit (CVU) with their process documentation. The CVU is an arm of Saath that produces films by and for the slum communities about different issues that effect them. They call these videos “Video Magazines”, and they’re screened in strategic locations within the slums (in the local language) so that people are aware of services and civic life around them (the most recent film they’re working on, for example, is a film about the upcoming elections in December, to tell the residents about the candidates and their positions on different issues that will effect them, and information on how to get an election card and who from Saath to speak to about this). The producers are all members of the slum communities, and are part of Saath’s paid staff.

So that’s the lengthier short version of what I’m doing. I feel lucky to be placed with this organization and it’s also nice to have been put to work right away considering that one of my largest fears was that I’d show up and have nothing to offer. I’ll do my best to write more often so that my posts don’t end up being so long, but if you’ve made it this far congrats!