From LUMS to Pind Begwal: Saving 9 on “Agency Moments”
In November 2017, Saving 9 formally launched their operations to a promising start. An Islamabad-based boutique consultancy company, Saving 9 seeks to ensure that medical first aid training is not just restricted to hospitals and medical centers but that it should be effectively disseminated in communities with scarce to no medical resources. Being the first trailblazer of its sort, the co-founders of Saving 9, Usama Javed Mirza & Ovais Siddiqui, endeavored to bring a change in the way we think of healthcare in remote communities. Their mission is two-fold:
1. To prioritize the health of community members.
2. To give community’s citizens the power to save a life or to prevent common injuries to becoming critical ones.
The motto of Saving 9 is: Educate. Enhance. Change. Save Lives.
For communities in underprivileged areas, the idea was to transform our own mindset. The more practical skills one learns and applies, the more one gets better at training oneself in medical first aid and then training the members of the community one lives in.
This model is popularly known as ‘train the trainer’ which has become highly sustainable all over the world.
Saving 9 is seeking to solve some of the most pressing questions of our times. How can the people of any community be mobilized to address their problems? Take a scenario for example. If a community member is bitten by a snake, what steps should be taken immediately before professional help arrives? Who can take those steps? In most cases, hospital service is non-existent or the only doctor in the community may be too far away, having knowledge of first aid training can greatly reduce the incidence of shock and sepsis, and potentially save lives.
How did it all begin for Saving 9? One of the co-founders, Mirza joined one of the societies in LUMS called Emergency Medical Service (EMS). As part of this society, members are trained to respond to physical and psychological emergencies in their campus. He spent considerable time to improvise the teaching of the curriculum and adding new modules as Head of Training and Development at EMS which also culminated in his receiving intensive training as a Medical First Responder (MFR). He further went on to get trained and licensed as an Emergency Medical Technician from New York during his Fulbright scholarship program from Teachers College, Columbia University.
Determined to launch more such models of Emergency Medical Service, Mirza partnered with Siddiqui and together they founded Saving 9. A question arises: Why was there a need for a consulting company like Saving 9?One thing the co-founders knew was that Saving 9 would be a unique, boutique consultancy company which will focus on healthcare and education services based on latest medical and educational research. Saving 9 started to spread first aid literacy in Pakistan through school teaching, local community master trainers, annual awareness events as well as social media awareness campaigns. They also started to participate in competitions, the first of which was Harvard University’s Seed for Change competition where they were awarded seed money to launch and expand their operations on a bigger scale. Consequently, they learnt that a startup company could be sustained over several years through the power of community-driven leadership and knowledge sharing. In their first year of operations, Saving 9 has trained over 500 people in first aid such as how to care for fractures, bleeding, snake bites, allergic attacks, choking, panic and anxiety attacks to bigger emergencies such as heart attacks and stroke.
In order to pilot their training project as well as set up a model Emergency Medical Service (EMS), Saving 9 had chosen Pind Begwal, a remote community near Rawalpindi area. After a thorough needs-based assessment, Pind Begwal appeared to be an accessible community but was in need of a proper EMS system. “Once we are satisfied with our model, and our pilot yields success, we will be able to scale up to other regions through our partner organization, Mera Maan,” says Mirza. “There are lots of innovative ideas and the community is eager, but it takes time to understand all that we are doing. The idea is to give everyone (from children to adults in all socio-economic brackets) the know-how to be able to carry out pre-hospital care up to their maximum potential”.
Often during an emergency, by-standers are usually the first persons to arrive at the scene of incident. “By-standers in Pakistan tend to cause more harm (leading to loss of life) than good out of good intentions but ignorance”, says Mirza. “Through a public first aid literacy campaign, by-standers can learn what to do that will help, and what not to do as well”.
Additionally, according to Siddiqui, “ A lot of deaths happen due to delayed emergency response or no response, in Pakistan. There have been cases of deaths due to excessive blood loss and blockage of air passage. These are avoidable casualties and only requires some basic first aid knowledge.”
This is where Saving 9 was born:
To grant everyone they meet to “experience an agency moment”!
True to its essence, Saving 9 is already enjoying the positive benefits of having provided such unique moments in underprivileged communities, by way of training in schools, colleges and corporate organizations.
However, are these small successes enough for a change-maker to be inspired? Not so in the words of Mirza who have had to deal with many challenges, which fortunately he viewed as normal experiences for a startup or implementation of a difficult idea with constrained resources. One of the biggest challenges for Mirza, a Fulbright scholar and an alumni of Teachers College, Columbia University, was trying to achieve the status of having done a “service” to his country however minuscule in appearance.
One struggle is for sure: We are and continue to be on the spectrum of battling societal stereotypes. In the context of entrepreneurship, the story is no different. For those with little to better knowledge and understanding of medical training and service extension to an underprivileged community, a startup company like Saving 9 has great stories interweaved with emotive brilliance to offer.
So what is this challenge against stereotypes? There was the idea that some people think Saving 9 was teaching them how to become ‘nurses’, which is equated with being feminine, and so this is not for ‘boys’. Mirza adds on,
“There are stereotypes about youth that I, and those I know have experienced in our work. When meeting older businessmen, there is a tendency to not take me seriously because I am younger than 30 years”.
The most interesting stereotype was tech-related. In the words of Mirza,
“Everyone in the entrepreneurship ecosystem assumes that we must be crazy about tech, and that the grand scheme of things will ultimately culminate into creating an app. We do not have a tech focus, and that kind of social entrepreneurship business model is considered exotic in Pakistan, and we are considered backward because we’re not developing apps or using virtual reality for everything”.
Siddiqui adds, “We have a lot of identities. We are judged based on our gender, age, nationality etc. on a daily basis. I have experienced the same. But what I have done is, I have always tried to be surrounded by people who genuinely care about the people around them”.
It is often said that the things which inspire us rarely inspires others on a personal level but the collective good that we do for a social cause pushes us to our edge. The recent on-going pilot project of Saving 9 in Pind Begwal community received quite a lot of support and admiration from community members. Saving 9 recently partnered with Glucose Trail for early detection, management and prevention of diabetes through telemedicine service which is a much-needed intervention for a community which has a scarcity of on-the-spot medical and health providers. Usama described, “Ambulance drivers are almost trained; they have 3 hours of classes left to take. We are purchasing the ambulance in the next 6 days*. We are working with schools to set up a scouts system for students, in order to further spread first aid literacy and create an informal response system. We are also finalizing dates for training roadside shopkeepers in first aid, as they are the by-standers that are closest in case of a car crash”. The Glucose Trail project now has a total of 48 patients who are being provided with diabetes-related medical support through a telemedicine app. Several medical camps and focus groups were conducted to train patients to self-manage their health needs.
How does Saving 9 plan to sustainably run in the near future? The first aid workshops need to be continuously run along with new development operations. “Our development operations are growing and are working well with the support of our sponsors. Glucose Trail provides us over $1000 every month, and we have received financial support from Harvard University and private individuals as well”, adds Mirza.
Moving forward, Saving 9 intends to scale up their current projects to other regions after evaluating the success of Pind Begwal pilot project. They also plan to secure more sustainable sources of revenue through their educational and healthcare consultancy services. Moreover, they are already expanding their focus to include mental health awareness and teacher training. “A key challenge in creating the EMS system has been molding a financially sustainable model. Pind Begwal is our pilot project, so we are doing a lot of learning, experimenting and pivoting”. Saving 9 is also striving towards greater social inclusion by not only diversifying their core team but also encouraging people with disabilities and unique needs to be a part of their training workshops and courses.
With regard to getting first aid training,
“Physical disabilities are stigmatized in this line of work. Generally, people can’t appreciate that you can still practice first aid even if you’re differently abled”, Mirza concludes.
Note: A model ambulance service “Maseeha” was successfully launched in the first week of 2019 in Pind Begwal. To date, trained Emergency Medical Personnels (EMPs) have handled around 35 emergency cases for all age-groups.
