Accountability Lab Pakistan has selected ten accountapreneurs for the 2020 cohort of their accountability incubator program and have worked hard to ensure they represent a wide cross section of Pakistani society in terms of both region and gender. The incubator is the lab’s flagship program for young civil society leaders to build sustainable, effective tools for accountability, participation and social impact in their societies.

Jayaa Jaggi is serving as a core team member of Youth Advocacy Council and Team Lead at E-Hands. She is the co-founder of Roshan Soch, a non-profit that aims to provide quality education to underprivileged students and has trained more than 500 students to date. She is also a Lead Trainer at Foster and has conducted many corporate trainings. The project she aims to develop through the incubator conducts sessions in educational institutions through their certified trainers, career counselors, including one-on-one discussions.

Anum Rathore‘s work is centred at the intersection of gender equity and environment. Her passion for empowering and elevating the voices, stories, and wisdom of women has led her to form “Women Rights Forum Pakistan”, a project which works to empower women and trans-people. Anam believes that “the way to get started is to stop talking and start doing.” Through the incubator she aims to create an online space that empowers and educates women and the trans community on pro-women and pro-trans laws through storytelling guided by policy and data. She also wants to use offline platforms and empower women and trans people through grass root community organizing.

Asma Saleem is a social entrepreneur and climate change activist who is passionate about transforming the world into a better place for present and future generations. For the past six years, she has been working with national and international agencies on gender empowerment, inclusion, localized climate action and disaster risk reduction. She is also involved in youth activism and advocating for youth rights at national and international levels. Through the incubator, Asma plans to develop a solution that will encourage better waste management and recycling practices among the general public through technology and social media. Through this project, she believes more jobs for content writers, designers, engineers, agriculturists and many others will be created. It will also help control pollution and environmental degradation.

Ammarah Shah is a social entrepreneur educationist who designs content for children narrated through modern storytelling techniques, online as well as offline. She is a master of puppetry, origami and an experienced public speaker in the local debating circuit. “Content for kids is being produced in written as well as in digital form but the motivation for a kid to chose a book over screen is lacking,” explains Anmarah.  “I think more than producing more and more stories, what matters is that we update the medium of transferring the content to the children understanding their level of understanding.”

Suman Ali Lashari is a young human right activist. At the age of 18 in 2016, she survived an acid attack from her 40-year old brother in-law whose marriage proposal she had rejected. In 2018, after fighting for 17 months, she won her battle for justice. Suman is now working on legislation for acid attack crime and the licensing of open sale acid in Pakistan. Suman is the first acid attack survivor in Pakistan who is a social media activist with her real identity of ”acid survivor” promoting woman empowerment in Pakistan. Through the incubator, Suman wants to start a legal awareness campaign among university and secondary school students so that all girls and women can be aware of their rights, especially with regard to acid attacks and other forms of abuse and coercion.

Muhammad Sarim Imran (Saro Imran) is a young transgender activist and entrepreneur. She has been advocating for the rights of marginalized communities for the last five years through various national and international platforms including the United Nations Universal Periodic Review (UPR). She also developed a community-based organization in her region called Activists Alliance Foundation (AAGAHE), which envisions a society where all transgender people can live with dignity, self respect, enjoying equal social justice and wellbeing. Through the incubator, she hopes to build a sense of ownership and activism in the transgender community in southern Punjab and empower them to ask for their rights and hold both governmental and non-governmental organizations accountable. Saro intends to achieve this through AGGAHE in Southern Punjab and other areas.

Fouad Bajwa has been actively involved with open technology, public policy and entrepreneurship. He has worked globally with various initiatives targeted at bringing open and low- cost technology to the less privileged. He is contributing to startups in the areas of artificial intelligence, biomedical engineering, public policy and governance. A mass skills dissemination program promoting learning, community and recognition that tries to remove the barriers that stand in the way of acquiring skills.

Sheran Panazai has five years of professional experience in the nonprofit sector and has also worked as a volunteer with various social ventures. Sheran aims to engage youth globally on a single platform where they can share, learn and re-learn ideas and bring them into action. He was recently selected for the Dalai Lama Fellow 2019 and Emerging Leaders of Pakistan Program 2016 for his work in preventing violent extremism. He is currently working as Project Lead at Tyche & Thoth. Through the incubator, he plans to develop an online system that will empower both senior government officers and civilians seeking assistance by digitally tracking the service provided by government departments.

Muhammad Adil is a street smart design thinker & UX designer who believes in solving real world problems with the assistance of design practice and technological intervention. During the past 8 years of working in diverse industries including education, health, media, SaaS and non-profits, with environments ranging from tiny startups to government organizations, Adil s exposed himself to various challenges involving user experience and visual design. Through the incubator he is developing CybenTrax, which works on improving the accountability of resources through its entire lifecycle, ensuring government organizations improve their bottom line. To ensure state-of-the-art accountability, CybenTrax uses blockchain, AI and variable printing, allowing easy accounting of an organization’s resources.

Huzaifa Hussain is an entrepreneur. In his over 15 years of experience, he has successfully implemented development sector projects worth over US$1 million. These projects were in the range of capacity building programs for chambers and association across Pakistan, start up coaching, business consultancy for trading companies and SME’s. He is currently working as an adjunct faculty member at the IOBM & Bahria University Karachi. He also contributes time as social worker in which he is an active worker in community based initiative on business upliftment programs. Through the incubator, he will work closely with the private sector to create awareness about business ethics through a series of programmes. The aims of this awareness campaign are to make a positive contribution to the business community and create opportunities for growth which are ethical, sustainable and profitable.

Sheena Adams