GESI and Safeguards: What Field Delivery Actually Looks Like

Pillar and Path Consulting is built around one working principle: the frameworks that international institutions write at headquarters — Gender Action Plans, Environmental and Social Management Frameworks, results matrices — only matter once someone can deliver them in the field, in the right language, with the right community, on time. That is the gap we work in.

We are a young firm, incorporated in 2026, built on a founding team with more than 25 years of individual experience across the UN system, WWF-Pakistan and Pakistan's Senate, and a roster of specialists with direct field experience across Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sindh and Punjab. We are not the biggest name in the room. We are usually the ones who have actually been to the districts the strategy document refers to.

Gender Equality and Social Inclusion (GESI)

We write Gender Action Plans that survive contact with the field: indicators that a provincial team can actually collect, targets that reflect what women in a given district can realistically participate in, and monitoring that catches problems before a mid-term review does. Our work draws on GEF-8 and SECAP-aligned standards, and on direct experience negotiating gender commitments into project design across sectors from water resource management to social protection.

In rural Sindh, Balochistan and KP, purdah norms, mobility constraints and land ownership structures are direct determinants of programme access — not footnotes to be addressed in a risk matrix. Our GESI analysis starts with the community, not with a template. Gender-differentiated stakeholder consultations, conducted in the local language by experienced facilitators, are the method. What they find shapes the design of indicators, activities and delivery mechanisms from the outset.

Environmental and Social Safeguards

Environmental and Social Impact Assessments, Environmental and Social Management Frameworks, Social and Environmental Screening Procedures, Stakeholder Engagement Plans and Grievance Redress Mechanisms — built to the standards that GEF, IFAD's SECAP and comparable donor frameworks require, and built to actually function once a project reaches communities that do not read English-language safeguards documents.

The Grievance Redress Mechanism that nobody in the affected community knows how to access is not a mechanism — it is a liability in a mid-term review. We design GRMs that communities will actually use, in formats and channels that match local realities.

Governance

Institutional strengthening, coordination architecture and accountability systems for public-sector and donor-funded programmes. Our team carries direct institutional familiarity with Pakistan's parliamentary and provincial governance architecture, built through roles inside the Senate Parliamentary Development Unit and multi-agency coordination work across UN system assignments.

Natural Resource Management

Water resource management, land use planning and climate adaptation programming, with direct current experience in Balochistan's water security and irrigation systems. Our associate network includes PhD-level water chemists, irrigation engineers with deep Sindh Irrigation Department experience, and GIS specialists trained in satellite-based water demand assessment.

Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL)

Results frameworks that hold up under donor scrutiny, and the field infrastructure to actually populate them. Our team includes hands-on experience deploying CAPI platforms — mWater, KoboToolbox, SurveyCTO — for real-time, enumerator-led data collection, alongside conventional MEL frameworks, baseline studies and results reporting. We know which platforms hold up in offline mode in interior Sindh and which fail when a field supervisor cannot be physically present.

Where We Work

Our field reach spans Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sindh, Punjab and Karachi, delivered in Urdu, Sindhi, Balochi, Punjabi, Pashto and Dhatki. For most of the institutions we work with, that combination — technical safeguards and GESI expertise paired with genuine multilingual field presence outside Islamabad — is the harder half of the brief to staff.

Current Engagement

We are currently serving as national consultants to UNDP-GEF's Integrated Land and Water Resource Management (ILWRM) project in Balochistan's Sibi and Kachhi districts, delivering a Gender Action Plan, Social and Environmental Screening Procedure, Environmental and Social Management Framework, and Stakeholder Engagement Plan to GEF-8 standards. It is a clear illustration of what we do: taking a set of institutional commitments and making them work on the ground, in the districts they were written for.