Opening New Avenues for Empowering Young Pakistani Women through Digital Skills

It is no hidden fact that Pakistani youth has a lot of talent and potential in all kinds of fields. And it is not only the male who fall into this category, young women in our country are as talented, smart and hard working as their male counterparts. We have ample proof of this fact among the students that we work with. Young girls in all the schools we work with have shown great progress in learning digital skills which is why we have made it our mission to develop inclusive as well as exclusive projects for our young female students.

A few months back Khud started an exclusive project with a bunch of girls from one of the schools that we collaborated with. This entrepreneurial project was named Aletere (derived from an italian word) which was basically a fashion news aggregator. The project had a great potential, it kicked off nicely and started to show traction very quickly. Unfortunately, the project had to be parked due to logistical issues.

Instead of considering this as a failure, we see it as a learning curve. We now have come back with a new and better project idea about automation, taking in a new cohort of young female students coming from underprivileged background. We have recently concluded a month long orientation period where our cohort was helped with learning and excelling Microsoft Office, Social Media and Content Writing, all the basics which will help them work on this project independently.

Currently, the cohort is being divided based on individual preferred skills so that everyone can do what they like to do instead of forcing the roles on them. With this project we are hoping to cater to a wider audience and have complete confidence that our cohort of these bright young girls will see the project through to success.

The idea behind starting such small scale entrepreneurial projects is to provide these young minds with an opportunity to get professional, more hands-on experience and to earn on their own rather than simply providing the training to relevant skills. It is like running a mini incubator, a self-funding training school in a hope that these women will use the ladder made out of digital skills to reach towards a better life and a bright future.