Hasta La Ideas

This is the third post in a 7-part series from Panthea Lee of service design consultancy, Reboot. In The Messy Art of Saving the World, Lee will explore the role of design in international development.

One year after the devastating Indus Valley floods, Reboot traveled to Pakistan in 2011 to design a better way to distribute humanitarian aid. The disaster had killed over 1,700 people and left over 20 million more homeless. When we arrived, the formal refugee camps and aid organizations had long since packed up and left, but millions of people were still camped out in makeshift shelters next to the piles of rubble that had once been their homes.

The international community pledged hundreds of millions of dollars in relief funding, but the majority of those we spoke with had gone without the aid they needed (some had never seen a dime). In order to create a better service model, we had to understand why.

What we uncovered was a strong example of how research and design can help the international development community not only solve pressing challenges, but discover and act on new opportunities.

We had been tasked with improving an aid program run by a global coalition of public- and private-sector partners, who distributed emergency funds through preloaded debit cards. The results had been mixed. On one hand, the debit card method promised a fast, easy and secure way to get aid to the people who needed it. It was ambitious and life-saving: Over US $230 million was disbursed to families in need in the first 70 days alone.

But on the other hand, the program was complex, involved multiple actors and was enacted in rural locations with poor infrastructure. Breakdowns were inevitable. We spoke with flood victims who waited in line for entire days only to discover that the ATM machines had stopped working and that their families would go hungry for yet another night. Opportunistic officials demanded hefty “handling fees” from textually or technologically illiterate families who needed help retrieving their aid funds. Some people qualified for aid but were denied because of glitches in the system; we met one such man who had walked 16 hours to Islamabad to plead his case with the government, unsuccessfully.

United Bank Limited (UBL), a leading Pakistani bank which had spearheaded the relief program, engaged Reboot to address these challenges. From the beginning, we understood that the root cause of many shortcomings was a lack of understanding: Corporate executives in Karachi and government officials in Islamabad had little knowledge of the rural, poor Pakistanis receiving aid and the contexts in which they lived. Without this understanding, it was impossible to design or deploy an effective system.

Thus, we began with an intensive design research process to better understand the flood victims—and the bank, too. (People don’t talk enough about empathy for your client, but it’s critical). We spoke with victims in 26 towns and villages, engaging with nearly 300 Pakistanis from all walks of life, from imams to street cleaners to loan sharks to vegetable merchants. Simultaneously, members of our team embedded within UBL to better understand its vision, needs and capacities. We spoke with staff of all levels and functional areas—everyone from the call center operators to the executives in charge—and we experienced first-hand how tough it is to run an aid program.

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