Biography

It all started as a chance encounter with a 9-year old boy selling pappadums in an upscale market in Pakistan’s capital city Islamabad. When I asked why he wasn’t in school, he expressed a desire to study but also his family’s inability to send him to school. I learned they lived nearby, so I asked him to hop into the car and take me to his home. That’s when I discovered a whole different world –literally in our backyard. There was this large urban slum just a few blocks from where I lived. That realization propelled me into doing something tangible to help improve the lives of this segment of our population that had been totally overlooked by our society and the government. I wanted to go beyond the decades of development sector consulting work that I had been doing up until then (and continued to do for a living) – even though this was also focusing on human rights and social justice. I wanted to work directly with grassroots communities to make a difference in the lives of people. Perhaps, my background in women’s rights activism and a family history of social work played a role in this decision.  

I hired a teacher and started holding classes, initially with just ten children, under a tree. I gradually motivated other parents to also start sending their children to our school. When ’my pappadum-selling family’ moved to different urban slum, they approached me to start another school there, as none of the children were going to school in this new locality either. These initial schools laid the groundwork for today’s network of Pehli Kiran Schools.