Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Riaz Haq on November 7, 2014 at 9:37pm

Without money or even a laptop to call her own, young Pakistani entrepreneur Sidra Qasim moved from her small hometown in 2011 to the big city of Lahore to start a business.

Her friend, Waqas Ali, asked her to join him as his business partner, and she moved into a hostel and took a job tutoring during the day. In the afternoon, she would walk 30 minutes to Ali's college campus where the two could use a free computer lab to work on their website. When the lab closed at 8, they went to the library and pored over copies of Harvard Business Review, reading case studies about start-ups.

Ali and Qasim are examples of a philosophy that some of the world's leading thinkers and philanthropists have been betting on: that the Internet and technology will help entrepreneurs in developing nations build wealth and pull themselves and their communities out of poverty.

In 2012, they had their first production run, and launched their business selling handcrafted shoes online. Within six months, their company, Markhor shoes, had sold 200 pairs of shoes in 17 countries.

"We were able to give jobs to 24 local craftsmen," says Qasim, who acknowledges that there is still work to be done, but it's a start. "In our next run we would like to increase their pay by two, and offer health benefits."

Technological advancements

Entrepreneurial advancements are especially impressive in the case of Pakistan, where power outages sometimes last 18 hours a day and foreign investment plummeted by almost a quarter in 2012 alone, according to the Central Bank. Facebook — the poster child of the new Internet age — was banned in Pakistan for a time in 2010, and YouTube, though easily reached through proxy servers, has been officially banned for four years.

And yet, information technology and communications is one of the fastest growing sectors in Pakistan's growing economy, which has seen its middle class double since 2002. In 2001, just 1 percent of the population was on the Internet; now Pakistan has 19 million Internet users, according to Census Bureau data.

"Even in small villages, people, especially young people, are using Twitter and Facebook," says Qasim. "People from my village order mangoes on their mobile."

Access to the Internet has made all the difference for young people like herself, says Qasim. Indeed, Ali, her hometown friend and business partner, got the idea for the online shoe business when he met local craftsmen in their village whose families have been making handmade shoes for generations, and saw their beautiful product. He thought they could find a wider audience by using Facebook and the Internet to market their goods.

Markhor's business links the old Pakistan with the new — in the glossy, hand-stitched shoes made in their local village, Ali and Qasim saw an opportunity that would exploit a hole in the market and employ local craftsmen who had been struggling to make ends meet.

Since 2000, Pakistani shoemakers had lost 90 percent of their business to China, leaving thousands without jobs. But the quality wasn't there with Chinese products. Ali and Qasim suspected that an international customer would appreciate a hand-crafted product that was hard to find, but available on the Internet.

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865614783/Young-Pakistanis-use-I...

• ▶ Reply