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Labs

Building Software that Maximises Human and Organisational Potential, Transforms Lives, and puts Evidence into Action

We combine CERP’s research expertise with the latest software development practices to create systems that have sustained impact over time. We do this by operating in tight iteration cycles in which we build, deploy, learn and repeat to maximise our impact. In essence, we exist at the intersection of software and economic development. 

Our Services

Digital Transformation

Optimising and digitising business processes

Software Development

Highly interactive web and mobile apps

Decision Support Systems

Developing interactive reporting, visualisation tools and dashboards

Software for Constrained Environments

Software development for off-line, high latency, and low bandwidth environments when software has to run in remote areas in challenging resource constrained environments

Application Architecture Upgrades

Moving existing software systems to a cloud based, and software as a service architecture

Decision Support Systems

Designing user-centric products and services

Our Approach

Process mapping, requirements analysis, & resource planning

Iterative Designing & Prototyping

Field Testing to Complete the Discovery Process

Deployment & Maintenance

Platform Testing & Quality Assurance

Agile Product Development

Technical Expertise

HCD Approach Towards Product & Service Design

Data Pipelines & Real-Time Data Syncing

Portable Systems, Cloud & On-Premise Deployments

Agile Product Development

Data Visualisation & Analytics

Wire-Framing & Design Prototyping

Full-Stack Software Development

Open-Source

Lab Projects

CERP Labs worked with the CERP Education researchers to build an application specially designed to increase the management capacity of low-cost private schools.

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Labs worked together with Cordoba Care to produce the AirMed suite of applications. Here, Labs is building the technology for a socially responsible tech startup aimed at improving healthcare delivery in Pakistan by strengthening the connections between nurses, hospitals, and patients.

CERP Labs partnered with researchers in the CERP Education program to create a marketplace connecting low-cost schools in Pakistan with Education Service Suppliers.

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CERP Labs worked with the World Bank, to design a dashboard to help the government allocate food resources to neighbourhoods where livelihood and income was directly affected by COVID-19 lockdowns.

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Economic Vulnerability Assessment

Economic Vulnerability Assessment

The Economic Vulnerability Assessment was initiated by CERP Labs to provide the public with data presented with respect to the economic effects and hardships faced by people in lockdown.

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Targeted Instruction in Pakistan (TIP) Tool

Targeted Instruction in Pakistan (TIP) Tool

TIP is a targeted instruction remedial program to help struggling primary students (grades 1-5) catch up in basic literacy and numeracy (Math, English and Urdu).

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PxD: Weather Advisory Tool

PxD: Weather Advisory Tool

Labs collaborated with the CERP PxD team and Precision Development to build a weather-based advisory tool to provide millions of farmers with weather based advisory to improve agricultural outcomes.

Impacting

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within Punjab, Pakistan

Infant Feeding

Infant Feeding

  • Offline-first MIS for LHWs to transform their door-to-door activities through comprehensive patient directory and check-up flows
  • Training modules for LHW with videos, images, and quiz library
  • Knowledge base of health care advice and best practices for lactating and pregnant mothers
  • In-app algorithms to diagnose health concerns for mothers and infants

testimonials

“I was one of the participants for the M&E course that CERP offered during the month of April. My primary motivation for joining the course was that I was always interested in learning more about the development sector and potentially working over there. I was especially interested in learning how projects are managed and what projects are relevant within the context of Pakistan. This course did not only do a brilliant job at exposing me to the kinds of projects that are going on but also the framework that is followed by the development sector, the skills that you need to develop in order to run a project efficiently and I think one of the theories that I will not only be carrying with me in the corporate sector right now but also eventually when I join the development sector will be the Theory of Change. I think this framework is just so helpful, regardless of what context you apply it in and other than that I was really grateful for the networking opportunities, the fact that I was able to meet like-minded people who were interested in the development sector or were already working there. I learned a lot not just from the teachers but from my peers as well and I hope to continue to stay in touch and continue to use the skills that I learned in my day to day life right now and also stay in touch with the connections I made during this class.”

Qandeel Tariq

Research Scientist, Amazon.com
“I was one of the participants for the M&E course that CERP offered during the month of April. My primary motivation for joining the course was that I was always interested in learning more about the development sector and potentially working over there. I was especially interested in learning how projects are managed and what projects are relevant within the context of Pakistan. This course did not only do a brilliant job at exposing me to the kinds of projects that are going on but also the framework that is followed by the development sector, the skills that you need to develop in order to run a project efficiently and I think one of the theories that I will not only be carrying with me in the corporate sector right now but also eventually when I join the development sector will be the Theory of Change. I think this framework is just so helpful, regardless of what context you apply it in and other than that I was really grateful for the networking opportunities, the fact that I was able to meet like-minded people who were interested in the development sector or were already working there. I learned a lot not just from the teachers but from my peers as well and I hope to continue to stay in touch and continue to use the skills that I learned in my day to day life right now and also stay in touch with the connections I made during this class.”

Qandeel Tariq

Research Scientist, Amazon.com
“This workshop was really good because I think this is the first time researchers are sharing their techniques for making decisions with the private sector. Usually, researchers operate in their own silos and the corporate sector in their own silos, but there are skills that are in both silos, and the two sides can learn from each other. The research sector can learn how large scale companies can use data and the corporate sector can learn how data can be made sense of. And in that sense, this workshop was really good, because it bridged the gap between the two.”

Mariam Chughtai

Director, Chughtai Lab
“This workshop was really good because I think this is the first time researchers are sharing their techniques for making decisions with the private sector. Usually, researchers operate in their own silos and the corporate sector in their own silos, but there are skills that are in both silos, and the two sides can learn from each other. The research sector can learn how large scale companies can use data and the corporate sector can learn how data can be made sense of. And in that sense, this workshop was really good, because it bridged the gap between the two.”

Mariam Chughtai

Director, Chughtai Lab

our team

Imran Zia

Executive Vice President, Analytics & LABS

Imran Zia

Executive Vice President, Analytics & LABS

Imran Zia

Executive Vice President, Analytics & LABS

CERP Labs worked with the CERP Education researchers to build an application specially designed to increase the management capacity of low-cost private schools. Labs worked in the field to iteratively design and prioritise various features with school owners, admins and teachers, ultimately building an application which synced data between different school devices in real-time, and batch processing.

 School owners were able to understand the learning outcomes, teacher performance, and attendance rates

Teachers were able to connect 
better with their students

Parents were aware of their
child’s performance

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Schools reached across all provinces
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Students reached
0 +
Increase in attendance as reported by some schools

CERP Labs worked with the CERP Education researchers to build an application specially designed to increase the management capacity of low-cost private schools. Labs worked in the field to iteratively design and prioritise various features with school owners, admins and teachers, ultimately building an application which synced data between different school devices in real-time, and batch processing.

 School owners were able to understand the learning outcomes, teacher performance, and attendance rates

Teachers were able to connect 
better with their students

Parents were aware of their
child’s performance

0 +
Schools reached across all provinces
0 +
Students reached
0 +
Increase in attendance as reported by some schools

CERP Labs partnered with researchers in the CERP Education programme to create a marketplace connecting low-cost schools in Pakistan with Education Service Suppliers. Schools are often not exposed to several inputs that could be critical in improving education outcomes in their schools, such as loans, quality textbooks, and education innovations in the EdTech space. By creating a digital marketplace which school owners were comfortable browsing and ordering from, we helped create a sustainable system for bringing increased choice and awareness of these critical education inputs. 

In just 6 months after launch, ilm Exchange had

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transactions
Rs 0 M
in total transactions
Rs 0 M
in total transactions
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transactions

When commercial activity was depressed because of forced school closures during the COVID crisis, Labs rapidly built a free distance learning solution for out of school children to watch educational lectures, curated and aligned to the Punjab curriculum by the CERP Education program. The rapid development of this feature has led to the merging of the MISchool and IlmExchange systems to better serve schools in Punjab as they emerge from this health crisis.



CERP Labs worked with the World Bank, to design a dashboard to help the government allocate food resources to neighbourhoods where livelihood and income was directly affected by COVID-19 lockdowns. The onset of COVID-19 and the blanket lockdowns across Pakistan implied large disruptions to income for workers in both the formal and informal sector. With many Pakistanis living at or near subsistence levels and dependent on daily wages, there were concerns that the lockdown would result in large-scale deprivation of basic necessities. CERP Labs visualised data coming from automatic phone surveys run in 34 neighbourhoods of Karachi targeting Katchi Abadis. Indicators derived from waves of surveys and plotted on an interactive map showed hotspots in neighbourhoods in which people had lost all their income, did not have money for a week’s worth of food supplies, did not have access to free rations in their neighbourhoods, and went to bed hungry the previous night. The World Bank and CERP are looking to take these capabilities to more cities in Pakistan, and provide comprehensive disaster relief support wherever possible.

Economic Vulnerability Assessment

The Economic Vulnerability Assessment was initiated by CERP Labs to provide the public with data presented with respect to the economic effects and hardships faced by people in lockdown. When the COVID-19 crisis struck, there was much discussion about the trade-off between locking down to slow the spread of the disease and the associated economic costs that possibly could not be borne by large swaths of the Pakistani population. Leveraging samples from ongoing CERP research projects as well as Random Digit Dialing, Labs was able to arrange and run a phone survey to determine the extent of income loss, consumption changes, loan and bill pay issues, food insecurity and attitudes towards lockdowns and COVID. The Economic Vulnerability Assessment has turned into a full-fledged research activity, with the same primary goal of informing the public with respect to the long-lasting economic cost of COVID in Punjab. Labs continues to aid in the management and development of an online dashboard to better convey the story to the wider public. 

Targeted Instruction in Pakistan (TIP) Tool

TIP is a targeted instruction remedial program to help struggling primary students (grades 1-5) catch up in basic literacy and numeracy (Math, English and Urdu). Despite a rise in school enrolments, a learning crisis plagues the Pakistani education system in which most students lack foundational skills even after several years of schooling. Low average earning and high learning inequality in Pakistan, especially at the primary level, is expected to worsen because of COVID-induced household shocks and school closures. If these losses are not mitigated, they will compound over time causing children, particularly from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, to perform poorly, disengage and even drop out. In the first phase of using the TIP tool, Labs helped researchers to roll-out the tool to 1200-2000 government primary schools, in partnership with provincial government KP. Tool assisted more than 5,000 teachers in identifying and categorising 300,000+ students’ needs and supporting the provision of adaptive curriculum and assessments. In the second phase, as an extension of TIP to other areas of Pakistan, Labs helped the researchers again to build new versions and extended the existing features of the TIP tool. The new versions of the tools would impact more than 250,000 students in 500+ schools in Islamabad, capital territory of Pakistan. This tool is still in continuous development with MISchool since it started in 2021.