n.V3-3.07 | THE FOLLOW-UP PROJECT
01| The sector's answer to evaporation is a promise: we will make sure it lasts. Ours is a line item.
02| In PI Production, follow-up and maintenance are projects. Not obligations, not commitments, not a paragraph in the exit strategy — units of production with a design, a listing on the Exchange, a budget, a team, task rewards, and a delivery date. The same five stages as any other project. The same possibility of rejection.
03| This is the single most consequential design decision in the volume, and it is almost boring in its mechanics. Everything the sector gets wrong about sustainability comes from treating what happens after completion as a virtue rather than as work. Virtues are unfunded. Work is paid. Once maintenance is paid work, it competes for attention on the same terms as the exciting build, and somebody's income depends on it happening.
04| Every project design has to name its follow-up before it can be listed. What will need checking, when, by whom, at what cost. A team that cannot answer this has not finished designing — it has designed a launch. The follow-up does not have to be funded on the same day, but it has to exist as a specified future project, or the parent project does not clear the bar.
05| This is why we folded follow-up into PI Production rather than keeping it as its own book part. A separate chapter on follow-up is a separate mental category, and separate mental categories are how maintenance gets postponed in every organisation on earth. There is no follow-up department. There is a pipeline, and some of what it produces is maintenance.
06| The Barrio Assets Team makes the portfolio visible. Every significant thing built in the barrio — a renovated square, a community facility, a piece of infrastructure — is tracked for condition and performance, the way a portfolio manager tracks holdings. Deterioration gets flagged before it becomes failure, and a flag generates a follow-up project on the Exchange. What the sector calls a sustainability gap, we treat as an asset management problem, which is a problem with known solutions.
07| Who pays for maintenance is the honest difficulty. Impact buyers like building things. Buying the second inspection of a drainage channel is less satisfying than funding the drainage channel. We should expect the maintenance segment of the Exchange to be structurally underfunded compared to the build segment, and we should design against it — bundling follow-up funding into the original purchase where a buyer will accept it, and pushing hard on the fifth mechanism below.
08| That fifth mechanism is local government, and it is not a fallback. Municipalities have maintenance budgets. Those budgets are systematically not spent in the barrios that need them most, partly because those barrios have no organised voice to demand it. A Maveriq who knows what her barrio has built, knows what it costs to maintain, and can make that case in a council meeting is the most credible advocate for public money that a barrio has ever had. IkoCiti does not replace government. It builds the capability to hold government to what it was already supposed to do.
09| The follow-up project also does something the sector never gets: it keeps the relationship alive. A team that returns to its own work at six and twelve months is a team that learns what its designs actually do over time. That knowledge is where the second generation of project design comes from, and it is unavailable to any organisation that measures at exit and leaves.
10| The claim in one sentence, so it can be attacked cleanly. Impact does not evaporate when somebody is paid to notice, and PI Production pays somebody to notice.
