Can Risks be Opportunities???

This Friday we had an amazing training session on Fiscal Management and one of the components we covered was the Risk Management or in other words recognizing and mitigating the risks in business and projects. There is no magic formula to avoid risks and in fact every successful venture have had list of risks and failures with the nickname “Experience”.

I must admit that unforeseen risks always make me panic but during this training I learned that the Risks can sometime be opportunities, which positively reshaped my perspective. During the execution of Jaroka Tele-Healthcare project we came across myriad risks (predicted as well as unforeseen) and the most recent one was the sudden monsoon floods in Pakistan marked as the worst natural disaster of the century. At that time, we were ready to launch the Lady Health Workers training on ICT and mobile software module. With this catastrophic situation in the country we knew the priority should be on providing emergency relief to flood victims rather than planned training. It was obvious that delay in trainings may jeopardize our credibility in front of Jaroka’s funders but our team decided to put an action plan to mitigate the risk rather than to face a failure. Free medical camps and tele-healthcare services on the go were arranged for the flood victims. Our team managed to reach and serve the victims with medical services in completely disastrous areas. This also gave us opportunity to test our software which would otherwise have taken months. Due to the consistent hard work and efficient system many international agencies contacted us and we were also able to train the Community and Lady Health workers on the software during the emergency situation.

I believe that risks are always there and what matter is the actions we take to mitigate the risk. In most situations with effective management the few risks if not all can be your best opportunity.