Automating a Revolution in Pakistan

If you had come up to me and predicted: “exactly two years from now, you will be leading a digital platform for Pakistani women, experimenting with Artificial Intelligence, Gamification and Animated films, speaking about your organization’s initiatives at local and global events, winning national tech competitions, working with the likes of UNICEF and UNESCO, exhibiting your work at leading museums and have global fellowships under your belt…”

This is how I would have responded:

In late 2016, I only knew one thing - I wanted to start a blog and share my frustrations as a woman in Pakistan. At that time, a Pakistani social media star Qandeel Baloch had been honor killed by her brother and it had driven many of us feminists a little bit insane. We were forced to think that if we tried to really live by our own rules and choices in Pakistan, how many of us would still be alive? Still loved by our families? I also couldn’t understand that besides our glamorous actresses and musicians, I couldn’t find a single female role model I could look up, be inspired by and follow as an example.

Searching for these role models, I ended up at an incubator The Nest i/o in Karachi where female entrepreneurs were sharing their stories. I listened, took notes and when the President of the organization (who later became my mentor Jehan Ara) announced that their “incubation cycle” was open for new entrepreneurs, I thought why not enter this “blog idea” in this "incubation thing".

Thanks to that one move and my acceptance into the incubation program, I got this massive introduction to the Pakistani tech ecosystem. Here I found one of the most supportive community of young women and men who helped me not only launch the blog called AURAT RAAJ (Women's Rule), but also start empowerment campaigns in schools, universities, lead several events and round tables on women’s rights. At the Nest i/o, I would learn a little bit about iot, blockchain, AI, VR and AR and I would dream about how I could apply these ideas into my own work.

This is also where I found the most volunteers and a key team member Ali Abbas who became quite central to our organization. The more taboos we came across, the more we realized that to make our progressive ideas about women empowerment palatable, we had to veil them under a strong story line.

Considering we didn’t have the budget for a full-scale production, we chose animation as our tool. Fortunately, Ali had been running an animation agency for a few years and created our first trailer that was seen by over 100,000 girls online and offline.

With this series, we wanted to touch upon honor, menstrual hygiene, abuse, cycling, boxing, entrepreneurship, child marriages, financial inclusion, nutrition, hand washing, bathing, life skills, work etc.

In Germany, one of my best friends and mentor Tino Hahn was sharing fellowships and leadership trainings with me so that I could be ready to make this organization bigger. He was also pushing us to consider “scale” as many of our initiatives were resource dependent and were not yet empowering a very large potential audience of 100 million women in Pakistan.

We were also getting many emergency cases where girls were going through domestic violence. Often not replying to a message on time could get life threatening for the girls. With zero resources, setting up a call center was impossible. So what could we do?

Could automating this important content for the girls be the answer? While we were still contemplating how to do this, I got into one of the most prestigious programs in Berlin at a social impact incubator called The Do School.

With my fellowship at The Do School, I had a chance to fully understand social entrepreneurship, work on an entirely different problem for a few months and compete for a seed prize for an idea that had been slowly developing in our team's head.

Of course from a far people thought that I had been driven astray from my vision. And was only enjoying a few months in Berlin but really I was working very hard on some of the next steps I had to make as soon as I went back to Pakistan with my startup.

I wouldn't lie - things were also super fun as I was innovating with some amazing people and living in one of most creative cities of Europe. Working on hard problems in Pakistan can be quite mentally draining but this was an outlet that made me ready for problem-solving back home.

At the end of the Do School program, and at the Demo Day, I pitched a technology idea that could potentially help my organization empower, educate and entertain girls at scale. This was a chatbot app that used artificial intelligence and human experts like doctors and psychologists to answer questions girls have about their health, hygiene and safety. Her name was RAAJI based on our series and 20 incredibly talented entrepreneurs around the world pitched their ideas.

I was so scared of messing up and I think I did towards the end of my 3 minutes but somehow when the audience voted, I took home the first prize. I remember splitting Pizza , dancing and celebrating that day! Winning was addictive :)

Right after this, the Do School board, past alumni and key team members voted on ideas and I won once again. During the same time, I heard that Silicon Valley based organization The Pollination Project also wanted to support our work.

When I returned in Jan 2018, our tides had changed. We were funded enough that we could evolve from a tiny content producing channel into a tech startup. By some stroke of luck, I got to know about a Do School mentor Christian Ehl who had been actively advocating about AI for social good. He understood this industry, had great connections and was full of positive energy. I reached out to him for startup advice and personal mentoring and he graciously accepted. To this day, I reach out to him for every good and bad news. I have sent tearful emails and he has stood by us through some hard time. With his advice, we hired one of the top development resources in Pakistan Syed Shahzaib and a bright student Naizam who would voluntarily help us on our mission.

What I didn’t know was that for the next few months, bad news would be aplenty as we would struggle, fail, iterate, and do it all over again many, many times. In this short time, we developed our app, released our new episodes, launched a campaign in rural areas, and continued to pitch for funding, acceleration, investment.    

By Summer of 2018, I had reached my limit of positivity. Funds were running out, and interest was low. We had also been pretty much duped by a potential investor which was heartbreaking for me. I remember writing to one mentor telling her that I didn’t even want to hear the name of my app anymore. Our volunteers were losing interest, and retaining core people was becoming hard.

Asking for money for me has always been hard. I didn’t know how to even start the conversation with some of our active supporters. 

One of the last competitions I had applied for during this time was a global one called She Loves Tech. They emailed me one evening with an acceptance to pitch in the local Karachi round. I was sure that I would have an anxiety attack on stage considering I had been under such severe mental stress. I had received at least 30 rejections from grants, accelerators and more.

I was so tired of hearing “no, no, sorry, maybe at a later stage, its good but..” I was also working part time with another startup based out of Berlin to fund many of our activities and meet my personal expenses. I was exhausted beyond reason!

One thing that really pushed me to go and deliver a pitch at She Loves Tech was that if I had a chance to win this competition, I could pitch the idea in Beijing which was pretty much the capital of artificial intelligence. I could meet tons of mentors and better the idea. I could be inspired once again that technology can be used for social good. AI could be used for social impact. And my work could speed up women empowerment.

The only different thing I could do this time was – do a live demo of the chatbot to show its capabilities. The chatbot could fail, not respond correctly or be so slow that I would be embarrassed in front of the leading judges. But at this stage, I had nothing at all to lose!   

I pitched in Karachi with all my heart against 9 amazing women-led initiatives, and I won. Then I pitched against 9 women-led initiatives from all over Pakistan and I won again. And the bot not only worked, it cracked a few jokes! At the end of the pitch, the audience had been rooting for Raaji and the judges even felt pressured!

In September 2018, I was headed to Beijing to pitch my idea and represent Pakistan at one of the largest tech conferences and I got to meet with some of the leading AI organizations like Horizon Robotics and many accelerators in China.

There I met female entrepreneurs from Canada, Germany, France, Indonesia, China, Singapore and realized how far ahead they were with their amazing ventures. And yet, they had all gone through similar issues of funding problems, rejections, lack of support like me. While their country tech ecosystems were more developed, they still had struggled!

I came back inspired, excited and ready to do a relaunch of our app with these learnings. But life had other plans. I was immediately selected as a changemaker from Pakistan to work with Indian entrepreneurs at US embassy sponsored program called Tech Camp. Within 5 days in the camp in Dubai, I had made lifetime friendships and business partnerships that could help me push Raaji across the border especially considering the taboos were very similar in India. I had also received some very good news that our animated series would be showcased in an international museum as part of a festival.

I was still absorbing all of this when a colleague and Do School fellow Shoshanna Richards shared that she wanted to write about RAAJI for the UN’s ICT agency ITU. I had no idea that her article would have a snowball effect and it would lead to us winning a TVE Global Sustainability award at the BAFTA. And soon after, a World Summit Award in Portugal. And a speaking opportunity at the World Summit for Arts and Culture in Kuala Lumpur.

During this time, we had been collecting tons and tons of data on our backend.

I wanted so badly to be in London to receive the award at BAFTA. This was a year of hardship almost coming to an end. I had less than a week to apply in order to make it for the event. My whole community tweeted to the British High Commissioner in Karachi to help me get there on time.

Despite everyone’s best efforts, I couldn’t get the visa in time. Our team watched the glamorous black tie event from afar and luckily our cofounder Tino Hahn received the award on our behalf. It was so incredible to have that moment where people from around the world were supporting and appreciating our work/direction. 

While right now might seem like we have made it, I still look up and see another big mountain ahead of me. The app still has many flaws, we have massive amounts of unclean data that we need to train our system on, we still need to hire more people to support RAAJI when the conversation fails and we need to get the app into the hands of many girls who need it.

The chatbot is not the only thing we want our app to offer, we're thinking about women empowerment games one day, introducing story podcasts, and a way for girls to create their own animated films based on their lives.

Time is limited, resources as well, and funds even more so. Expectations are high from me, and failure and rejection still haunt me. But if we’ve made this far from pure passion and the desire to disrupt the “silence” on taboos, I am certain we will make it on the other side. 

Our goals right now look a little like this:

And we are now looking to take on a technical cofounder (CTO). Raise a seed round. Get a board of advisors in place who can mentor on new partnerships and developments. We need access to communities to test and validate the idea further. I also want to invest my time in learning more about data science, machine learning, chatbots for social good. I love film and documentaries. I hope to do a feminist film festival one day where women's stories are heard and told. There are many, many courses I wanted to invest my time in and so much learning out there for me to do!

This blog I wrote is exactly for this purpose. I never intended to become a social entrepreneur. I never intended to be in tech. I just wanted to build something that could outlast me and continue educating, empowering and entertaining girls on some tough topics even after I am gone. And to have that legacy, I need mentoring, I need support, I need great people around me. I have been lucky so far but for our future sprint, we need a global village of supporters. We need a #RAAJI movement. That's why I am applying for the TOPTAL scholarships for women: Empowering Future Female Leaders to Change the World. I need female mentors who can say: "I've been there, I feel you, its frustrating but here is what you need you to spend your time doing instead of complaining"

Thank you to everyone who supported our journey – you’ve changed a small time blogger to an impact entrepreneur. I will leave you with one of the first video I made about the chatbot for an accelerator we applied for. Unfortunately, we were rejected because we were too early stage then and needed a lot of work. But for me, this was the first time I put myself out there and shared my idea on social media and got tons of feedback. I hope to stay in this mind frame of positivity and genuine surprise that I can innovate, I can dream, I can DO! I never want to lose that sense of wonder. 

Raaji has helped me really step out of my comfort zone and do some of the hardest things I could ever do. One of them was asking people for help. Building out our financial projections. Creating an app with zero development knowledge. Learning three different chatbot softwares. Pitching in some very stressful situations. Making lots and lots of mistakes. And doing a 100 million different variations of our pitchdeck.

I am grateful for everything - even the weight I've put on in the last year and the tiny wrinkles around my forehead from all my overthinking.

It almost feels like Raaji and my journey has just begun! Go #RAAJI!

One small update, almost every accelerator we applied for eventually rejected us in the last round. i2i accelerator took a big bet on us. Our acceleration is ongoing and we hope to make them proud.