Chapter
Rawalpindi and Islamabad: where Peace Through Prosperity’s work began, 2011 to 2013
Peace Through Prosperity’s work began with a single street cobbler in 2011, was tested through the 2012 survey of 444 cobblers, known as the Mochee Project, and ran its first workshop in Rawalpindi before reaching any other city.
Everything else on this site, including Karachi, grew out of what PTP learned here between 2011 and 2013.
2011 to 2012
The Mochee Project: the fieldwork and the survey
The work starts in 2011, with fieldwork among street cobblers, or mochees, the shoe-repair craftsmen who work from street pavements across Pakistan. That grew into a pilot survey, run internally as the Mochee Project, whose 45-page report (36 pages of body) was published on 12 July 2012. It was carried out in Rawalpindi and Chichawatni in Punjab, and Haripur and Darra Adam Khel in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. It was not carried out in Karachi.
The survey engaged 444 cobblers, against a target of 500, and produced 438 usable responses, or 424 excluding Darra Adam Khel. Of respondents, 58 per cent were from Bajaur Agency, then part of FATA, and 78 per cent are Pashtun from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The Darra Adam Khel responses were seized by the local political agent’s office during the survey and released on 27 June 2012, too late for the report.
cobblers surveyed
survey areas across Punjab and KPK
survey report published
Read the Mochee Project outline and the geographical areas covered, including the account of the Darra Adam Khel seizure.
Mid-2012
A UK shoe-repair chain opens its training
In July 2012, PTP’s adviser Roy Newey arranged a meeting with James Timpson, chief executive of the UK shoe-repair chain. Timpson agreed on 24 July to share its training materials, and within two days PTP’s UK team had the curriculum for shoe and watch repair. On 15 August, Kubair Shirazee visited the Timpson Academy at HMP Blantyre in Kent, where trainers reviewed footage of Pakistani cobblers and recommended changes to their toolkit, including tubular rivets, a hand stitching tool and hand shears. The material went to Islamabad, feeding into PTP’s own Business Growth Manual.
Read the full account, Standing on the shoulders of a giant.
September to December 2012
The first workshop, and a cohort that never ran
In the week of 3 September 2012, PTP ran its first Business Growth Workshop, in Rawalpindi: four street cobblers, over five two-hour evening sessions on business planning, marketing, pricing and record keeping, field-testing version 1.1 of PTP’s Business Growth Manual, then only in Urdu. It was run by Nazish Zahoor, who was PTP’s chief executive in Pakistan for that year only, with Baber Qureshi and research intern Asad Ullah. Programme delivery dates from this September 2012 workshop.
That November, PTP mobilised a larger, 30-strong Rawalpindi cohort, but abandoned it before any training took place, after a delegate demanded a bigger venue, better catering and a doubled stipend, paid to him. The team refused and walked away from the deposits already paid. The lesson, to keep early cohorts small, was applied the following month: December 2012 saw three cohorts run successfully in quick succession.
Read the first Business Growth Workshop, the diary log that followed it, and the account of the abandoned November cohort, We knew it was never going to be easy.
2013
Islamabad: the testimonial series
Through 2013, PTP tracked what its cobbler-turned-entrepreneur participants in Islamabad were earning before and after the programme, then called the Business Growth Program and now the mini-MBA: four days of teaching, then three months of coaching. Wali Khan, at G-11 Markaz, saw his daily earnings rise from $5.35 to $11.05 and his profit margin from 37 per cent to 77 per cent. Jaan Baaz Khan, at Humza Tower, F-11 Markaz, supporting 12 dependants, went from $4 to $10 a day. Batal Khan, at G-11/2 Markaz, had lost a shoe shop in Karachi’s 2012 riots and restarted as a street cobbler in Islamabad; his revenue rose 58 per cent. A guest speaker series joined the workshops from the March 2013 cohort, opening with co-founder Kubair Shirazee.
Read the testimonials for Wali Khan, Jaan Baaz Khan and Batal Khan, and the first guest speaker session.
2012 to 2013
Setbacks along the way
The founding years were not a straight line. On 13 October 2012, a suicide blast killed 16 people in the market at Darra Adam Khel, one of the four survey areas, days after PTP had recorded an interview there about what drives young men towards the Taliban. Through 2013, Islamabad’s Capital Development Authority ran a “clean and green” campaign clearing street traders from the city, disrupting cobblers who had been through PTP’s programme, including one whose revenue had grown 200 per cent.
Read Word from Dara Adam Khel and the CDA reports, Powerless and Impact of the wrong kind of government interventions.
2012 to 2013
Bahawalpur: a needs assessment, not a rollout
Alongside the workshops, PTP ran a separate needs assessment in Bahawalpur, Southern Punjab, interviewing close to 500 entrepreneurs of circumstance between 2012 and 2013, distinct from the 444-cobbler Mochee survey. It looked at semi-urban and rural households where the local market was too small to sustain a single trade, and at whether other household members could take up a second craft. It was research, not a full programme rollout.
Read the Bahawalpur needs assessment.
Where it led
Proved here before it went anywhere else
The programme was proved in Rawalpindi and Islamabad, and the smaller towns and cities around them, before it was brought to Karachi. It has reached 4,000+ micro-entrepreneurs since 2012. What began as a single evening workshop with four street cobblers became the mini-MBA, still run to the same shape: teaching, then months of coaching, inside the community rather than apart from it.
See what the programme became on past programmes and the mini-MBA, and the fuller founding story on our story.