Bridging gaps in our society
By: Saad Mohsin
Tags: Amal Fellowship, Amal Academy, Megaprojects

The gap between rich and poor

When the moderators shared the guidelines of the mega project on the previous Sunday I was worried and tensed because I thought that it is difficult to come up with an idea in such a short amount of time. However on the next day while running at 630am in the park I went into a self-reflection zone where the thoughts about the project were bouncing up and down in my mind and during this moment I realized that I already know the problem that I should solve.

The Problem

Well two days before the mega circle guidelines were shared I was in a pharmacy buying medicines for my grandparents. At that moment I saw that a women was taking a loan from cashier as she did not have enough money to buy her medicines. I also saw that if the medicine is composed of 10 tablets then they were getting only 3 because they did not have the money to pay for the rest of the table. At that shop I realized that if someone who is poor may have to skip taking medicine or consume less than what the doctor has prescribed.

My Solution

By now I had gone through the design thinking course and I am proud to say that I want to work for and start with what I have and therefore I wanted to solve this problem for my community. The problem was that poor or low income families cannot afford medicines.

After thinking about the problem I was pondering a lot on the solution of this problem and then I decided to give the rich an opportunity to help save lives with their money.

Now I am thinking of providing a service to my local community using which they can buy their medicines and I will give them the option of the amount of discount they want to add to their cost that is from 1% to 10% which means they will be saving about 100–1000 Rs and this is what I will use to help the poor. This amount of discount in the end is the same amount of money that people give to panhandlers daily and now instead of giving to them they are not only buying their own medicine but also contributing towards someone else’s medicine.

Right now at this point this problem was nothing but my own thoughts and needed a different perspective due to which I contacted my friend who was the former president of Chadar (Community Service Organization). I sent him a voice message on WhatsApp and explained to him all my thoughts about the project. He liked my idea and gave me the contact details of the founder of the organization Wajiha Ali for further advice and suggestions. I had a 15 min call with Wajiha where I told her about my idea and she actually went deep into it and gave some really cool tips and suggestions about how I can pursue this idea. Besides talking to them I also had a chat with my mother since there are two maids working in our house and she gave me an idea on what percentage of their monthly income gets spent on medicines. Similarly my grandmother also gave me an insight on what amount of monthly income of their maid gets spent on medicines.

After digesting all the different perspectives i decided to apply this idea on my community only for the next 2 months.

The rich community i wanted to target were my neighbors

Shows the houses to sell the idea

The poor community that i wanted to target were the ones closely connected to my community.

The poor community who needs those medicines for free

A view of the community that i want to address

Well this is what my idea looks like and i hope that everyone enjoys reading it and do tell me what you think about it.