‘Pakistan needs more life-saving ambulances’

Interview with the Chief Executive of Aman Foundation, Malik Ahmad Jalal:

Published on Friday, 19 January 2018

Ahmad Jalal has more than 15 years of international experience. He has been associated with The Abraaj Group since 2011. Mr. Ahmad Jalal has been CEO of Aman Foundation for the last two years

Recently, BR Research had an opportunity to have a chat with Jalal. Here are some of its edited excerpts:

BR Research: What is the history of Aman Foundation?

 AJ: It is the brain child of two people from Karachi who loved Karachi: Mr. Arif Naqvi and his wife Ms. Fayeeza Naqvi. They are the founding trustees of Aman Foundation. They are great philanthropists and have supported TCF and the development in Rashidabad. But over a period of time they felt that they wanted to make their philanthropy more structured to increase its sustainability. This is how Aman Foundation came into being as a not-for-profit trust in 2008.

BRR: What is your vision?

 AJ: Our ethos is that whatever we do, we offer good quality services across all economic strata. There are two areas that a nation needs to work on for its prosperity. One is health and the other is education.

When they were in Dubai Ms. Fayeeza met a Pakistani who was working in a hotel. He mentioned that if he could speak English well he could have gotten paid 30-40 percent more. This incident got them to think that technical skills training should be offered so that people can be empowered to do jobs. But on top of that they need to have soft skills as well, such as being able to speak in English, compose appropriate emails, etiquette, mannerisms etc. That is where the idea of Aman Tech started.

BRR: What does Aman Tech offer?

AJ: We started in 2011 and our first batches graduated in 2012. Aman Tech is a huge centre which focuses on 12 traits such as auto-mechanic, refrigeration. And we offer soft skills such as how to knot a tie for interviews. We also teach empathy and collaboration so that these kids can interact easily with people from different religions and different sects. For example, if they go to Dubai they will have to work with, an Indian, a Bangladeshi and an Arab. Coming from closed communities, the kids may not have exposure of that so we train them to become not only more skilled workers but also better human beings.

BRR:  What about Aman ambulances?

 AJ: Mostly people associate Aman Foundation with Aman ambulances, the “peeli” ambulances, which began offering services in 2009. There was a recent study done that 30 percent of the cases get worse in the ambulance because of the way people are picked up and put in the ambulances and because of the jolts they get on the way.

The Aman ambulances are set up using the New York ambulance services as a model. It has a command and control system. When a call is made they provide medical guidance till the ambulance arrives. The ambulances are well equipped with a cardiac monitor, defibrillator, oxygen, lifesaving drugs and a paramedic, a nurse and an EVO (Emergency Vehicle Operator) driver trained in BLS (Basic Life Support).

BRR: How successful has your program been?

 AJ: In the last 10 years we have done 900,000 interventions in ambulance services. The government of Sindh has taken it under a public-private partnership and expanded it to Thatta and Sajawal. Forty two babies have been born in those ambulances in the last nine months because the distances there are so long that the mothers cannot get to the hospital in time. Almost every week a child is being born safely. We are in talks with the government to take Aman ambulances to another 4 to 6 districts in Sindh.

BRR: Why is Aman Foundation mostly Karachi based?

AJ: The founding vision of Aman Foundation was that if you draw a circle around Karachi, you represent the humanity of Pakistan. In the not-profit sector, often you try to do many things and try to spread your projects across. But we believe that it is better to direct your resources and your attention in a limited area.

Our model is to promote, come up with a pilot, scale it, and develop a track record. And once we have done a good job, scale it further to other parts of the country. We are in discussion with local partners to start up this service in Islamabad. Now we have a model, we need partners.

BRR: How do your partnerships work?

 AJ: One model that we work on is that the government can provide the building and the CAPEX, we provide our operation system, procedures, industry alignment, expertise and a donor provides some of the working capital. Our main thinking is that we need to bring in partners to scale because all the problems are so big that by themselves, no one can solve them.

 BRR: When and where are you planning to take your model to other cities?

 AJ: At the moment we are in discussion to set up a vocational training centre just outside Lahore with a donor and the Punjab government. We are looking at the next 6 to 12 months. We are preparing a proposal and feasibility report in collaboration with the Thar Foundation to operate a vocational training centre there as part of Thar development. The approval should take about 6 months. So in a year or two, we should have vocational centers like Aman Tech in one to two places.

BRR: Do you hope to export labour that is trained by Aman Tech? 

 AJ: Pakistan needs to be industrially very strong. Unfortunately, Pakistan has a very mercantilist thinking that we try to export everything. But our own industry is not very competitive because our labour force is not skilled. Our intention is to primarily train for the domestic market but we would like that 20 to 30 percent of those go abroad because their value in terms of role models is very high.

BRR: Do you work in collaboration with the industry?

AJ: Vocational training is about one thing: jobs. Jobs are completely dependent on what the industry needs. Every two years we do an industry alignment exercise. We take the curriculum and we create focus groups from within the industry to find out whether we are teaching the right thing. We get their feedback and update our curriculum accordingly.

BRR: Do you help in terms of placement as well?

AJ: Of course. We have a career services department that arranges industry visits to Aman Tech and finds available jobs for placement. Our employment rates are between 67 to 75 percent. Every six months, about 1500 students graduate from Aman Tech.

BRR: What is the socio-economic demographic of your graduates? Do the students drop out often?

AJ: Most of our programs are male oriented though we have programs for female employment as well. 37 percent of these kids come from high risk areas such as Lyari and Orangi. Our minimum age is about 16.5 years and the maximum age is 25.

On average we graduate about 82 percent of our students but for the longer course the graduation rate decreases to about 60 percent.

 BRR: Do your graduates start their own businesses as well?

 AJ: We basically have three categories of employment. One is formal employment such as MNCs; such students are usually older than 18 years and have a diploma additional to our training. Majority of students are employed by the SME sector or the informal sector. About 20 percent of our students end up being self-employed or micro-entrepreneurs. This can be as a plumber or a handyman.

As a next step we want to set up incubation centers for micro-entrepreneurs because self-employed people get paid at least 50 percent more than formal employment. And after three years they earn at least twice as much.

BRR: Does funding from international donor agencies affect your agenda?

AJ:  Aman foundation is institutionalized philanthropy. The idea is that if you want to do something on a large scale, you have to be a process-driven organisation and attract institutional partners such as the government, USAID, or Gates Foundation. You can count on their involvement in the foreseeable future unlike personality driven institutions.

We have never built a program around donor needs. For example, we created Aman Tech and USAID said this is fantastic, we will fund students. So all they do is they fund the tuition of the students we take. Their two requirements are that over three years, we graduate 4000 students and their placement rate should be 70 percent.

BRR: What programs are offered to women?

 AJ: We have a mentorship program Subh-e-Kiran that is funded by British Asian Trust. We offer beautician courses, training on operating textile machinery and IT skills for office assistants.

We recruit the students through a social mobilisation model. Women go to high risk areas and conduct info sessions. We also provide them with transportation because without it women can’t attend the classes. Also, there is a lot of recruitment through word of mouth because women can get other females in the family to join.

BRR: What new areas are you considering offering within Aman Tech?

AJ: We are always looking for innovation in trade development. The rate of change of industry is huge. We want to move towards IT skills such as app development. One of the things we are also working at is robotic welding. Some Japanese organisation is going to place its robotic welding here for training and through that their people can be trained as well as ours. The third area we want to go into is renewable energy maintenance, particularly solar panels.

We are also going towards DAE (Diploma Associate Engineering). This is a 3 year accredited program that is your base requirement to get a job in a multinational.

BRR: Let us talk a bit about donations. Which area consumes the most of it?

 AJ: Main area for donations in which we incur deficits is our ambulance service because it is a high cost area. One ambulance costs Rs6.3 million and the cost of a life-saving intervention is Rs.4000/=. We have 80 ambulances, of which 60 are on the road.

BRR: Are you pleased with the pace of growth of Aman ambulances? 

AJ: We feel that we are at a stage that we have the management capability and the process system maturity to be able to do much more. We cannot oblige all the calls that come to us because our ambulances are busy. Pakistan needs more life saving ambulances. Karachi alone needs 200 lifesaving ambulances but Aman Foundation can only provide 80; other ambulances are more like transportation.

The need is huge. We get more than 1000 calls of which we take about 350. Some are OPD (Out Patient Department) which is not the purpose of our ambulances. But we are only able to take about half of the calls that are medium and high risk so there are many that we are not able to attend.