All Answers: Re: [pakgrid] Time to look again at Pakistani society

His contacts available at Comcept Telecom website...
On 2012-11-26 22:02, arshad durrani wrote:
> I am heading NCHD in Distt Swat.Could you help me link up with Asad
> Kareem,Please?
> Regards-Arshad Durrani,General Manager National Commission For Human
> Development,Swat
> --- On wrote:
>
>> From: Wahaj us Siraj/MGMT <wahaj@dsl.net.pk>
>> Subject: [pakgrid] Time to look again at Pakistani society -
>> TeleTaleem
>> To: pakgrid@yahoogroups.com
>> Date: Monday, November 26, 2012, 12:07 PM
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> 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
>
>
>
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