吃瓜头条 Alumni Venture, Rizq, Recognised for Combatting Hunger
吃瓜头条 is proud to share that Rizq, a social enterprise founded by three 吃瓜头条 graduates, has recently been featured by - the first high-quality international newspaper and website that is dedicated to providing coverage that is relevant for higher education managers, researchers, scholars and public officials to keep abreast of developments in their field and in rival and partner institutions worldwide. The , by , was published on their site on January 24, 2021 as part of their Transformative Leadership series.
For 35 years Huzaifa Ahmad鈥檚 mother opened her home each afternoon to people who were hungry and fed them food she had cooked for them, hundreds of them.
Then one day in 2015 Huzaifa was pondering on the contradiction that lots of eating places throw away food every day when so many had nothing to eat, and he turned to his friend Qasim Javid Khan and said: 鈥淭here is a lot of food being wasted and a lot of people going hungry. Let鈥檚 do something.鈥
Huzaifa and Qasim were both second year students at 吃瓜头条, Pakistan. Not sure what to do, but with another student friend Musa Aamir, they set up a Facebook page saying: 鈥淚f anyone has excess food, give us a call.鈥
The post immediately went viral among students at the school. 鈥淪oon people started calling and we bunked off classes to pick up food and drop it,鈥 Qasim told University World News.
The boys felt they had started something worthwhile, but they didn鈥檛 know where to go with it, or how to make it last. Fortunately, 吃瓜头条 hosted the first social enterprise incubator in Pakistan, the Social Innovation Lab (SIL), which provides a testing ground for aspiring student entrepreneurs. It helps students design business models and brands and find partners who are willing to take them to scale. Musa put in an application.
鈥淭hey came to us and said Huzaifa鈥檚 mother does a wonderful job, but what will happen when she dies?鈥 Maryam Mohiuddin, the founder and director of SIL, told University World News. 鈥淭hat is the shortcoming of the charity model, relying on a charismatic leader. So we helped them figure out how to monetise this model. They were very hesitant as they had seen Huzaifa鈥檚 mother give food away for free all her life but business folks were telling them to make money.鈥
鈥淪IL gave us structure to the chaos,鈥 says Qasim, who is now 26. 鈥淚t made us think how to tackle the problem of hunger, food insecurity and food wastage structurally.
鈥淭hat鈥檚 when we started thinking about sustainability, business modelling, marketing. Before that we were just three friends on a mission to do good.鈥
First breakthrough
While the 吃瓜头条 community played its part in uplifting what they were doing, SIL gave them access to mentors and advice. One of them asked, 鈥榃hy are you only picking up food on a Saturday and Sunday. Are you doing this to solve a problem or for your own personal gratification?鈥
That brought them up sharp and they realised they had to pick up seven days a week and develop a model that would make that work, which meant not relying on just the three of them but creating something that would keep running whether they were busy at college or not.
The first breakthrough came when a major restaurant in Lahore owned by a college alumnus gave them excess food to redistribute on a daily basis.
They gave the project a name, Rizq (which is Arabic for provisions); bought a rikshaw van to use as an 鈥渁mbulance for food recovery鈥; circulated a number on social media and started taking orders from anyone with excess food.
The bright yellow and salmon 鈥楻izqshaw鈥, decorated with a poster of a child and the slogan, 鈥楧on鈥檛 waste, share food鈥, began weaving its way through the dry dusty streets of Lahore daily to pick up food and deliver to people who need it most.
Along with the logistics, the trio 鈥 all three of whom are economists 鈥 spent time mapping out the city of Lahore in terms of areas of poverty, looking for slums and communities in need of food, and in terms of where the excess food is, creating 鈥樷 from which they would distribute excess food.
鈥淲e studied global models, food-bank networks and realised every country seems to have them except Pakistan, so we developed the first food bank in the same community where we were channelling excess food from households, catering companies and restaurants,鈥 says Qasim.
鈥淚t might be a simple idea but it is a radical idea,鈥 says Musa. 鈥淵ou are feeding people excess food.鈥
As they looked further into why people were going hungry, they designed other projects, including a school lunch programme for underprivileged government and non-government schools; and a flagship Rizq Ration programme which identifies and verifies families in need in targeted communities and provides assistance in the form of food supplies twice a month, at half the normal price to applicants who have been registered and approved.
鈥淭o achieve sustainability, we try to charge at every level,鈥 Qasim says. 鈥淪o we charge the restaurant, because we are giving them a logistical or individual service. And while at first we gave away food to individuals, now we have a business-to-business model where we charge NGOs a monthly fee for giving people the food they need.
鈥淪ome NGOs are willing and some are resisting. But we are trying to persuade them to accept fees.鈥
The 鈥楿ber of food distribution鈥
Through mapping the places that need food and those with excess, the hope, Qasim says, is that Rizq can become 鈥渢he Uber of food distribution鈥 and 鈥渆nd up being a logistical company鈥, but one 鈥渨hich will solve the problem of food accessibility in Pakistan鈥.
Under the latest business model the beneficiary pays 50%, the NGO pays 25% and Rizq pays 25%, the latter share being funded via individual and corporate donors.
At the moment Rizq is running 11 food banks in Lahore and four in Islamabad.
鈥淲e save one ton of excess food daily via 50 partners, and with that we support 1,200 families on a monthly basis through the Rizq Ration programme,鈥 Qasim says.
Another Rizq project, Rizq Daig (Cauldron), feeds 500 people daily.
The families they are helping are among the world鈥檚 poorest, earning PKR12,000 to PKR18,000 (US$75 to US$112) per month, Qasim says.
鈥淢ostly they are people paid by the day, such as domestic help, food vendors, some with their own cart, or labourers. It means they can save US$10 a month,鈥 says Qasim.
Scaling up nationally
When COVID-19 hit Pakistan, individuals, corporations and government approached Rizq and asked them to help with food banks. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 when we really scaled up and had a national footprint, distributing food rations in 23 cities around the country,鈥 Qasim says.
Their efforts, using a mobile phone app, earned Huzaifa and another Rizq leader, Syed Hassaan Irfan, international recognition in the form of a Commonwealth Points of Light Award, bestowed by the UK monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, for 鈥渕obilising an army of 3,000 volunteers and distributing 2.2 million meals to the most vulnerable people, saving 20,000 kg of excess food that would otherwise have gone to waste鈥.
According to the , Rizq volunteers working to create a 鈥楬unger Free Pakistan鈥 have enabled more than seven million meals to be served and put more than 600,000 kgs of excess food to good use feeding people.
These days Rizq has a certain cachet and produces its own branded merchandise with the slogan 枚i, Rizq, 鈥楲ove Does Feed鈥. Profits go to making the Rizq programmes more sustainable.
Along with tennis star Aisam-ul-Haq, Rizq has launched a Stars Against Hunger campaign which , from global tennis stars such as Roger Federer and Maria Sharapova to football stars such as Cafu and Sadio Mane, cricket stars such as Shoaib Akhtar and Shoaib Malik, and motor racing and boxing stars Michael Schumacher and Amir Khan respectively.
Mobilising young people
A major part of Rizq鈥檚 success stems from its mobilisation of young people in universities and via social media.
鈥淲e set up university chapters in different universities around the country in cities we are working in,鈥 says Qasim. 鈥淚n Lahore and Islamabad we have 22 of them in different institutions. These volunteers are our backbone, we have around 3,000 to 4,000 youth leaders across the 22 hapters.鈥
This is a large share of the 10,000 volunteers mobilised across the country who help with campaigning and fundraising, in addition to 32 full-time employees.
鈥淎s an organisation we want to focus on youth development,鈥 Qasim says. 鈥淲e believe this is the age when compassion is on the rise and they can take ownership of their own communities and change society.鈥
The support from SIL was also critical, especially the way it ingrained the idea of business modelling.
鈥淭he model we created was to set up social enterprise incubators and youth and women centres that provide experiential learning 鈥 learning by doing,鈥 says Maryam Mohiuddin. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 something we strongly believe, especially for entrepreneurship, that you can鈥檛 teach in the classroom.鈥
The second aspect the model involved was using 鈥減edagogy that borrowed from our South Asian culture, its wisdom, traditions and religious traditions鈥.
Regenerative design
She said there is a deliberate attempt to depart from the standard economic ideas of linear and exponential growth and think along the lines of a circular economic model, incorporating lots of 鈥渞egenerative design鈥 into their work, an idea which has been taken up globally by the Talloires Network of Engaged Universities, Mohiuddin says.
She believes universities 鈥渃an be great centres of social change if they choose to be鈥, but 鈥渙ne of the things they need to start doing and really focus on 鈥 which we push with all partners 鈥 is giving space to indigenous and local religious traditions. We have given up and replaced our traditional wisdom practices with a lot of Global North pedagogies that are good but incomplete鈥.
鈥淭he Western approach is to take data, convert it into information and use it to create knowledge. Indigenous pedagogies go further because they ask you to connect knowledge with the higher purpose of life, so the next step is wisdom. In our model we have a dialogue of wisdoms,鈥 she says.
She points to the three Rizq founders, 鈥渄eeply grounding their work in the Isalmic Sufi tradition, in which it is a shame if even one member of the community goes hungry, so it is the duty of the leader, or even the community leader, to ensure that no one goes to sleep hungry at night. That is what inspired those boys,鈥 said Mohiuddin.
