Daily Times

“Today’s celebration of Women’s Day gives the concept of realization that no achievement and success is possible without the backing of a woman to any society. It is said that “behind every successful man there is a woman”, but now women have shown that women are not only behind success of men but also achievements of women, as now a days women in every field of life play inspirational and motivational role for young girls.

Meet Madiha Tai, owner of a gourmet food business based in Karachi and Lahore. Madiha’s company specializes in chocolates, gelato, baked goods, and provides catering services. In addition to retail outlets, Lals Chocolate also has an elaborate online store. Madiha has availed business development support services related to digital marketing, design, and product photography through USAID’s Small and Medium Enterprise Activity (SMEA). These services are enabling her to effectively market products online and increase sales, especially during Covid-19 lockdowns. Madiha is motivated to change the traditional food business and has chosen to challenge.

Mariam Sarim is leading ‘InstaEnergy’, a woman-led business established in 2018. InstaEnergy works on residential, commercial, industrial and micro-solar projects, by partnering with leading technological companies. They provide clients with the most advanced and efficient solar panels and inverters, alongside photovoltaic systems design technology and software. Mariam availed business development services support through USAID’s Small and Medium Enterprise Activity (SMEA) to develop a dynamic content management system website along with digital media services. This support is enabling InstaEnergy to increase its sales and revenues by enabling it to market itself more effectively through utilizing digital marketing platforms especially during the COVID lockdown.

Mariam is committed to make a change in society, and she is definitely is a champion.

Azima Dhanjee is a passionate young woman who is CEO and Co-founder of Connect Hear which focuses on sign language accessibility and deaf inclusion using technology. She received a grant from USAID’s Small and Medium Enterprise Activity to further expand her business. Connect Hear charges corporations for in-person interpretation services and provides video interpretation services to its customers over multiple video conferencing platforms. The company has secured several national/ international awards in a short span of time.

Azima aims to introduce sign language interpretation as an employment stream in the market which facilitates the deaf to participate in mainstream economic activities.

Amna Waqar, Founder, Amna’s Natural & Organic. A Lahore-based enterprise led by a passionate woman entrepreneur, who learned the traditional art of spice and food processing from her family. Over the years, she kept that practice alive by selling spices to close friends and family members. For the past few years, her clientele started to grow, and she decided to turn her household hobby into a commercial business. With help from her son and a childhood friend, she established ‘Amna’s Naturals & Organics’. While establishing her business, she has faced multiple growth challenges related to processing, packaging, and equipment. At present, the processing and packaging of her products relies on manual labor, which is inefficient and time-consuming. This limits the enterprise from fulfilling large orders and demand for products. Through the USAID SMEA grant, Amna’s Naturals & Organics will procure the latest food processing machines and packaging solutions, including an oil filling machine, dough mixer, heavy duty spice grinding machine, grain/flour grinding machine, latest nitrogen flushing vacuum seal machine, food dehydrator, a commercial baking oven, and a few more machines needed to aid the processing and packaging of products.

Ambareen Kazim, Co-founder, Wellness Food Processing. A woman-owned processing unit that produces human consumption-grade quality dry pet feed. It started with a small home-based setup and received encouraging response. Within a short span of two years, its production capacity increased from 20 kg per week to 1.6 tons per day. In order to compete with imported pet feed, Wellness Foods produced first of its kind pet food production in Pakistan, which is fit for human consumption. The enterprise seeks to bridge the gap created due to increased duties on imported animal feed and rupee depreciation, by producing quality pet food locally. Through the USAID SMEA grant, Wellness Foods will procure a heavy-duty non-touch specialized packaging machine which will enable its products to compete with international packaging standards and in-house food testing lab, which will enable quick quality control checks, recipe developments, and testing of samples.

Sumaira Kanwal Headmistress Govt. School Liyari Town Karachi, shares her experience and challenges her school had to face during the lockdown when the schools were closed due to Covid-19.

“When the Covid-19 pandemic spread in the world and Pakistan, we were not getting authentic information at that time, also the information was not available to us from reliable sources. There was fear among children, adults and as a school headmistress I faced trouble because our schools were closed. We feared that in our area some parents already don’t focus on their children’s education much. Community Mobilization Program (CMP), which is mainly funded by USAID has an important role in schools as they mobilize the parents, offer training sessions and motivate them to send their children to schools.

My school is a girls’ primary school, and due to CMP’s support enrollment rate had improved a lot. We were concerned how parents would bring their children back to school with the added fear of corona as a lot of parents were afraid that their children would get infected if sent back to school. As a head teacher this was also my concern that how will be able to control the dropout rate; and how we will be able to bring them back to school. Around that time, we were contacted by CMP and invited to an online session initially to know about our wellbeing. This also gave us an idea and we started to contact our students and their parents through the available numbers and addressed their concerns during Covid situation. You should know that Lyari is a very backward area and mostly the parents are poor and can’t afford internet, or to buy tablets or laptops for their children so conducting online classes seemed next to impossible. But when the government of Sindh started our own training sessions regarding online classes in public schools, we designed a syllabus for online classes, focused on being able to provide maximum education in minimum time, to the students.”