Hope amidst despair
In Sep 2020, destiny introduced me to Airaj Firdaws, Ahmad Khalid and Najib Rahmati to form a colleague bond and work as a team. With different cultures, ethnicities, and academic backgrounds, we had one thing in common, “aspiring to become the faces of hope for our community”. In Aug 2021, as humanity was progressing from eternity to infinity, the imperceptible hand of destiny parallelly stirred us and Afghanistan to confront different fates. The Afghanistan government collapsed, and we came up with HOPE (Humanitarian Outreach for Poverty Eradication), a non-government, young and committed community members gathered together to find solutions to better confront the ongoing crisis in Afghanistan.
With the fall of the Afghan government on Aug 15th, Afghanistan is now exposed to a humanitarian crisis more than any time, poverty and unemployment rate is expected to cross 90%, and the migration flow will increase up to 80% in the upcoming year of 2022 ( UNDP, Sep 2021). These examples alone are sufficient to indicate how vulnerable Afghanistan and Afghans will become unless certain measures are put into action. But these examples are also topped with the brain drain with the flight of academic minds from the country and the youth’s energetic potential to rebuild the country. These problems and their commitment towards our country led us to think together and develop the HOPE volunteer group.
Based on our previous experiences, we as a volunteer group, have planned to undertake different short-term and long-term initiatives to help solve community vise problems. We have underlined different sets of impactful initiatives that will contribute to make a viable community for the Afghans despite being in any situation. First, we as a team, identified major problems Afghanistan faces, then brainstormed to counter these problems by creating term wise steps and becoming the inspiring face for other youths to roll up their sleeves and bring a broader change in the community.
“We aspire to create inspirational stories for our posterity to read and for theirs to write.” Hasibullah Artiq | Founding member- HOPE volunteer group
Our motive “Every Youth is a seed of Hope, let us grow”
Our vision “A self-reliant, poverty free Afghanistan”
Our first step: “The Knock of Hope”
Due to the spread of COVID19 and the fall of the Afghan government, a majority of people are in urgent need of food supplies. Procuring these supplies is even harder for hard-working laborers such as local street sweepers, school teachers and school janitors. Our initiative is called “The knock of Hope,” which aims to help 20 families in need of basic food supplies. We have selected hard-working class families such as municipality street cleaners, local transport laborers, and school janitors. To put it briefly, the concept is to provide one month’s food supplies package, put it next to their door, knock, leave and capture their smile.
Why do we need the funds?
The funds will procure the food supplies, pack the necessary items in one package and transport the packages next to the beneficiary’s home. The package we have considered consists of items which are available from the domestic market at a very affordable price so that we could provide healthy and nutritious food to our beneficiaries. We have, up to possible scale, considered the balance of necessary minerals in our package.
How will we use the funds?
We will create the list of beneficiaries and share it with the potential funder, a list of one-month food supplies created in consultation with our nutrition expert will also be shared with the funders. The supplies will be bought and packed for each beneficiary. On each package, the location and name of the beneficiary will be written with a specific serial number. This will ensure transparency of the project while making the process easier to track.
Our Methodology:
In order to better cope with our concept we have designed our initiative as a short-term distribution project, in which we have considered transparency measures such as enlisting beneficiaries after a short interview with each. Packages labeled for each beneficiary, GIS datasets and transparent accounting dataset. In order to implement “the knock of hope” and reach to as many people as possible we have designed the project under these four stages
- Finding people from targeted groups: To enlist people in our beneficiary’s list we dispersed into our districts, finding a total of four families each was set as a goal; we then sought our beneficiaries within a 1500m of walking distance and selected four families each. The people we selected falls under the following categories;
- Local laborers also known as Jowalis : These people can be found on every corner of the market hubs, street junctions and public spaces with their two wheeler on their hand. Local Jowalis are also people who work in big markets to transport heavy items across the market shops. These hard laborers are now exposed to scarcity of jobs as some of them left unemployed due to lack of customer engagement with markets. When asked about their job, the majority of them replied with “no customer, no job”. Hence, these people are in urgent need of support.
- Municipal Street Cleaners: These people are scattered across streets of Kabul doing the hardest chores yet still the majority complain about insufficient salary, with the banks being closed, their salaries are also frozen in the banks and are in urgent need of assistance and support.
- School janitors: While schools are closed these people are uncertain of their future, especially women, who are most afraid of being unemployed and losing the ability to provide for their families. The salaries of these people are also left frozen in the banks and are in urgent need of assistance and support.
2. Arranging Packages: Each family will have a designated package each, on which their prime information will be printed, their GPS location will also be encoded on the package label so that the data collected will be used for further analysis and visualization in the GIS environment.
3. Transporting the Packages: The arranged packages will be delivered next to the beneficiary’s home. We will have a camera on the site in place so that when we knock and leave the site, it captures the smile of the person receiving the package.
4. Writing story: After distributing all the packages we will incorporate all of the data into a story and will be posted on different social media platforms to give inspiration to other youths. The stories, as well as GIS maps and database will be shared with the potential funder.
We have started this journey of making an impact with the anticipation of obstacles on the way forward, but we are confident that our ambitions and hope will sail us through to our destination.
