When I was growing up, I was acutely aware of the deep poverty that existed around me in Pakistan. It scared me. I wanted to make sure that I don’t fall into it. Luckily, I had all the opportunities provided by my mother to avail. I was fed, housed, clothed, tutored, loved, and celebrated. So, I studied hard, went to college and became a professional. I made a very decent life.

As I travelled around the world and got to know different cultures, languages, and religions a stark reality hit me. First, the level of deep poverty is staggeringly high in Pakistan and other 3rd world countries compared to the first and second world countries. Second, locally and globally, although awareness might be there, but actionable plans are almost non-existent. Causes of poverty are wide and complex, thus socio-economic challenges make it difficult to tame.

However, I soon realized that my early age response to seeing such poverty had been very “me” focused. I had assumed that all grownups in the world were so mature and caring that they must have plans in place to address these issues for the poor people. But as it turns out that is not the case. Consideration towards poor population is not widespread. Additionally effective solutions to solve this issue are rare. I was consumed: what can I do? It was clear that I must do something! I looked deep into my original “me” response, realized that I myself had focused on education to succeed so my attention started to be focused on a solution that enables all children to fend for themselves. It was clear that children in poverty must be educated to get out of this vicious circle.

However, scope of the problem is huge. Just in Pakistan there are over 20 million children between the ages of kindergarten and 5th grade that don’t go to school. If we open schools and hire teachers to educate these children, it will require hundreds of billions of dollars. For years I kept on thinking about what solution can provide us a cost-effective way to scale out the education at a fraction of the cost.

For last 30 years I have been using technology to enable large corporations to expand globally. Based on this background I started focusing on involving technology to solve this issue. I observed that very young children were very fascinated with technology. They can take a smart phone and figure out how to play games. So, I thought what if we use technology to standardize all lessons and make them available to all children on very low-cost Android tablets. For the very young we can provide games to play and teach English, while for the older kids we can provide a simple but comprehensive learning system. The system can take a standard curriculum and guide the children’s study. We can even enroll students in a virtual school and certify them as they learn. This way a tablet becomes a teacher and a school. If this hypothesis is successful, we can transform the education of the masses.

There are tremendous number of complexities in this idea. Although there is all kind of educational content available in the world on the internet, but it is in English. Even apps teaching formal English are designed for English speaking kids. One of the biggest gap, as it turns out, is how do we take a child who lives in deep poverty, does not even know that a language called English exists, has parents who have no education, and have no access to technology and take that child to teach English and connect them to a learning system without access to teachers.

Imagine: “Take a 5 year old child in deep poverty from a remote village. Give her a tablet to play with. The tablet becomes her teacher and the school. See her speak and write basic English by grade 1. See her connect to and learn from the world resources by grade 8. See her get a college degree from The
University of Houston. See her work for a global corporation…. all the while living still in a remote village.”

We said, let’s do a pilot project to test this hypothesis and develop a system that can be scaled out to thousands of children in the whole country and around the world. We currently have a test version implemented in two test schools. We plan to complete a fully testable version within a year and implement across multiple schools. In our schools all children who can’t afford the tuition fee study for free. We even provide books and uniforms.

Please help us make this successful. You can sponsor a child, sponsor a school, or contribute towards deployment of the technology.