This is indeed great news :). Mubarak to Asad and his team! Indeed he is a great entrepreneur and is great knowing him! Pakistan has changed by the Grace of Allah in a good way. And projects like Tele Taleem are a sure indication of this new era :).
Dear all,
Despite all the gloom and bad news, resilient Pakistani entrepreneurs are trying to make the country a better place for all of us.
TeleTaleem is a venture launched by Asad Karim, a serial entrepreneur and Co-founder of Comcept, first pay phone manufacturer in Pakistan in 1990s, and Co-founder of Burraq, a long distance carrier (LDI), which was sold to a company today known as Wi-Tribe. TeleTaleem is a project targeting improved learning environments for school students in remote areas of country by using telecom links and tablet PCs.
Asian Development Bank (ADB) has recently made equity investment in TeleTaleem, in the form of a Technical Assistance (TA) to be swapped as equity at TA closeout. This is ADB's first-ever private-sector-led investment in an education project.
TeleTaleem has also won an innovation (in education) grant from DFID in June 2012, in a hotly contested nationwide proposal solicitation process.
The project was recently show-cased in a Financial Times article by Charles Leadbeater.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/986153d4-2804-11e2-afd2-00144feabdc0.html
Having known Asad Karim for last many years, I can say with confidence that he's a true face of Pakistani entrepreneurs who have left lucrative opportunities overseas, preferred not to leave their home country except for higher education and have fought their way through thick and thin to create wonders. An engineer by profession, Asad with support of his team, have made numerous contributions to the society by following honesty, hardwork and patriotic spirit. Success usually follows such people.
Kind regards….Wahaj
Time to look again at Pakistani society
By Charles Leadbeater
The Financial Times
Pity the people of Pakistan, trapped between self-serving, complacent
elites who preside over a crumbling state, and a rich array of violent
extremists who seem determined to tear the same state apart. The
extremists promote crisis and the state depends on crisis to persuade
people to put vested interests aside, if only for a while.
The military, the country's most meritocratic and efficient
institution, is widely regarded as the only force that can break this
grim cycle. Yet there are other, largely hidden forces at work in
Pakistan that hold it together and offer it a better future:
adaptability and resilience, entrepreneurship and shared coping.
These forces can be found in the very new – widespread mobile banking
services – and the very old – Islam's traditions of charity, justice
and learning. When government and donors work creatively with these
forces, amazing things can happen.
Pakistan has one of the best regulatory environments in the world for
microfinance and one of the fastest-growing microfinance sectors, with
3m borrowers. It is also one of the most innovative places in the
world for mobile banking services, partly due to the State Bank of
Pakistan's moves to encourage the market. About 1.5m customers make
about 30m transactions a quarter through their mobiles, using a
network of 20,000 agents, mainly local shops, to collect their cash.
A wave of charitable giving by individuals has helped to ensure that
the hundreds of thousands of people displaced by floods in 2010 are
not still living in tents. A guerrilla army of more than 100,000 Lady
Health Workers, funded by government, has helped to reduce markedly
the number of women and babies who die in child birth, according to
studies by the World Bank.
Too many children are still out of school and many government schools
are woeful. Yet Pakistani parents go to enormous lengths to give their
children, girls and boys, a chance at an education.
Low-cost private sector schools, charging perhaps $2 a week, are
booming in slums and villages. Wherever girls receive a secondary
level education, small private schools run in the homes of their
owners start popping up, as they put their education to use to improve
their standing in society. Even the government's conservative figures
suggest that a third of children in Pakistan and half in Karachi, many
of them from poor households, attend such schools.
The Citizens Foundation, funded entirely by small, anonymous
donations, has created almost 900 high-quality schools catering for
girls and boys from poorer backgrounds, taught by women teachers
trained by the charity.
Indeed, Pakistan has a record in picking up new approaches to
learning. The Allama Iqbal university in Islamabad, the first open
university outside the UK, is the second largest in the world with
1.8m students. Start-ups such as Tele Taleem, tucked away on a dusty
industrial estate on the outskirts of Islamabad, are pioneering ways
to take learning to schools in the remoter regions, through satellite
links and cheap tablet computers.
Donors are playing a vital role in promoting social innovation. The
UK's Department for International Development has pioneered a new road
map for school improvement in Punjab, which Sir Michael Barber, the
education reform expert, says is delivering one of the world's fastest
improvements in school performance. In Karachi, tens of thousands of
poorer families will next year receive vouchers to send their children
to low-cost private schools.
In agriculture, social venture capitalists such as Indus Basin
Holdings are leading efforts to link groups of small-scale rice
farmers to multinational companies.
Pakistan's institutions may seem frozen, its elites worried that
taking on the extremists will provoke even more violence in the run-up
to next year's elections. Yet, at the grassroots, Pakistan is in
perpetual motion, with ceaseless creativity as people find affordable
solutions to their basic needs. These largely hidden forces of
resilience offer the best hope for the country's future. In Pakistan,
the state may be fragile but society is far stronger than many think.
The writer is a visiting fellow at the National Endowment for Science
Technology and the Arts
Shahid H. Mir
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