emotional income

I spent my whole last week in Chiba, Japan attending a meeting on skills development and employment of young people organised by the ILO in collaboration with UNESCO. Chiba is a well organised small town built on reclaimed land about 40 minutes by train from Tokyo.

The meeting was a great opportunity to interact with some interesting people and learn about new issues on employment. The highlight of the event was meeting with Ali Khan – a young social entrepreneur from Pakistan. His organisation, PNYS, seeds social programs in the marginalised communities (tribes) of Pakistan. His work focuses mainly on empowering young women to become more educated and start their own social programs in these communities.

Over the 3 days, we got to talking about the issues surrounding our work, focusing on how little resources is available for the high-impact on-the-ground work. Specifically, we were talking about the misallocation of resources by the development community to low impact work. More resources should be made available to social entrepreneurs who need to deliver high-quality services to communities at the bottom of the pyramid. In order for social entrepreneurs to deliver high-quality service they need to build organisational capacity and this can only happen with significant amount of funds.

At every point of the coversation we reached a dead end in terms of finding solutions; finally I just had to ask him – “How do you keep persevering when all the odds are against you?”

He answered with two simple words – “Emotional income!”. Ali adds ” You can’t put into words the sense of satisfaction you get when you see the lives of the people you work with changed forever.”

I believe Ali’s work is crucial – particularly because he is empowering young women in Pakistan – a country where women play a marginal role in society and as individuals they do not receive the necessary education and support.