My mentor and good friend, Nadeem Chawhan an organisational story teller, once said, “If you’re smart and know how to market a product, you can sell anything even if its crap, packaged and presented in the right manner.” I looked at him, and thought, how on face value it seems to dwell a lot about the abilities of a marketer but can it really be true? Can waste really have any economic value for anybody? And as it is with all things ‘Chawhan’, it did turn out to be true. For only a few days back I came across a very interesting article titled ‘Waste Not: In Ghana, fecal sludge could be black gold’. Ghana, it turns out, does not have a proper sewerage system, with households relying on dumping companies to empty their latrines. Sometimes, when people can’t pay for the dumping trucks, the toilets are shut down and people have to rely on other places to defecate. The sludge collected is then dumped in the sea, with disastrous environmental consequences.
What really struck me about the article was, that instead of treating it as a problem this social entrepreneur treated the problem as an opportunity. The plan, Murray introduced was simple. Instead of people having to pay for their tanks and latrines to be emptied, he plans to pay them for the waste – or take it for free and use it to convert it into a product that sells. What’s his idea? Along with their research and funding partners which include Columbia University, the Gates Foundation, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, they will turn human waste into industrial fuel that can potentially run industries, and build the world’s first fecal-sludge-to-biodiesel plant funded by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Enter 1986. The first PC virus ever made was a job done at Chahmiran, near the Lahore Railway Station. This virus was made by two brothers, Amjad Farooq Alvi, 26 at that time and Basit Farooq Alvi, 19 who were self taught programmers. In a shop called Brain Computer Services, expensive software was sold cheaply for as little as $1.50 each. This made it a very good bargain for foreigners thronging Lahore as well, and when they went back with copies of the softwares little did they know that those copies were infected with the Brain virus. The fact that two self taught managed to shake the world, sitting in the small part of inner Lahore is nothing less than pure genius. Want to know where the two brothers went? Well they opened their own company called Brain Net, pioneers in the field of the internet services industry.
Why have I cited the two stories together, because this is exactly what Pakistan needs. We need creativity, we need ingenuity and companies and organisations owe us a responsibility to nurture these talented individuals of Pakistan. Telecom companies in Pakistan have taken a lead by identifying areas that need support and ensuring that communities, individuals and villages are facilitated. Such steps are surely very encouraging and one hopes that other companies will follow suit. Telenor for instance has sponsored training labs for disabled people, while Mobilink and Ufone have also launched a plethora of similar campaigns. At the end of the day, what really makes a difference is investing in social enterprise, in projects that convert a problem into an opportunity. People like the Alvi brothers are spread across Pakistan and their talents merely need to be tapped in, to find creative solutions to seemingly difficult problems that plague the country.
All we need to do is market our products the right way and find out of the box solutions to our dilemmas.
Writer is News Editor, Profit. Comments and queries at [email protected]
