KARACHI: After five years of studying and working abroad, Mashall had come home to start a position at SaafWater, a social enterprise that provided purifiers to the country’s 16 million people living without clean water. Feeling confident about her worldly experience, she was ready to take on the role of Operations Manager, even if only for a brief stint, originally appeared in Acumen.
“After being abroad, I was feeling very adventurous,” she said. “Really, I was an intrepid idiot. I thought I knew everything about everything, but I had no idea what I was doing.”
As part of her role, Mashall was responsible for setting up ground operations to help the company with its sales and marketing to reach the low-income communities on the outskirts of Karachi. “I was essentially the equivalent of an Avon saleswoman,” she said. Eager to dive into the work and connect with the company’s potential customers, Mashall bought her first burqa and eagerly headed out for her first ride on a city bus.
“It took two hours and three transfers to get across town from where I lived,” she said. “It was the first time I realized not only what public transit was like in Karachi but also what life was like for so many. I grew up in a family where we had everything we needed and more. I had lived a life as a woman in Pakistan that is better than 99 percent of the country. This was an immediate reality check.”
The bus ride was only the beginning. As Mashall hit the streets, she quickly learned she didn’t really know the people she aimed to serve. While low-income families initially agreed to buy the water purifier when she came knocking at their doors, they didn’t become repeat customers. Mashall learned that though families were grateful that she and her team spent the time to explain the purifier’s benefits, but that didn’t necessarily mean they were willing to change age-old buying habits. It would take a lot more than a few visits and good intentions to establish trust. The purifiers began to come back to SaafWater’s offices in hoards.
“We thought we understood our customers’ motivations, but our entire model was based on a lie we had told ourselves,” she said. “We weren’t asking the right questions. We were refusing to see the truth.”
Disillusioned, Mashall decided to leave the company. She wanted to address the challenges she was seeing in her country but was unsure how one individual could make a real, lasting impact. She took some time off and began to study a subject she had always excelled in but never fully explored. As a child, she had access to high-quality education but always felt she squandered the opportunity. She found a tutor, Ahmad Raza, who pushed her to become a self-learner and spend the time to explore different ways of thinking and approaching and solving problems. He opened her mind as well as her eyes to a different style of learning she had never experienced.
“He awakened this idea in me,” Mashall said. “If a teacher doesn’t just meet the student’s level of passion but doubles down, insane things can happen. That year of open-ended study changed my life. It filled me with wonder and possibility. Here I was 27 years old but I felt 10. I kept thinking ‘Shouldn’t I have discovered this kind of learning when I was 10?’”
The wheels in her mind turning, Mashall started to think of how she could create an environment where children could learn how to learn and be encouraged to develop the tools and critical thinking skills necessary to advance their own development. Rather than rely on traditional top-down instruction, she thought using computers and other new technology could give them access to resources not readily available, encourage independence and empower them to work together.
“I essentially wanted to create a space where kids could come and geek out,” she said. “Kids are amazing. They’re like little super computers. They’re so smart, open and absorbent. I wanted to find a way to tap into what they are curious about and set them on a path to explore that to the ends of the earth.”
She started to visit public and private schools across Karachi to get a realistic picture of Pakistan’s education system. What she discovered wasn’t pretty: One fourth of Pakistan’s population?—?52 million children between the ages of 5 and 16?—?are being denied a decent education. Schools, especially in low-income communities, are set up in dysfunctional buildings that lack clean water, working toilets and reliable electricity. Teachers are often under qualified, underpaid and, as a result, uncommitted. And despite the government’s commitment to a free, compulsory education, it has only dedicated two percent of the national budget to making sure children receive the schooling they deserve.
While some people may see taking on Pakistan’s education crisis as daunting, Mashall saw an opportunity, a possibility to test her theory and invent a new solution to one of her country’s biggest problems. In 2013, she created the Reading Room Project, a social enterprise committed to unleashing the high potential of Pakistan’s low-income children by creating supportive learning environments and harnessing the power of the Internet. If Mashall and her team could develop a curriculum by creating the best online educational content and build a structured yet motivational space to learn, she believed children could discover what they were really curious about and, what’s more, become life-long learners.
She and her small but dedicated team began to design a computer-based learning program built within a rich, guided environment and convinced a principal to run a 12-month pilot in her school’s defunct computer lab. Mashall made a deal?—?she would provide classes free of cost for 34 children to help improve their tests scores and, if their methods didn’t work, they would train the teachers to run the lab.
Certain she could use educational technology to help children become rapid self-learners, Mashall and her team kicked off their pilot focusing first on English and digital literacy. The students learned everything from how to turn on the computer to the basics of coding. The kids grasped the technology in a matter of months, but Mashall started to realize half of the class was illiterate. “These were third graders, ranging in ages 7 to 16, and they couldn’t read,” she said. “They couldn’t decipher text and not just in English; some didn’t have basic literacy in Urdu.”
Mashall quickly became aware of Pakistan’s alarming illiteracy rate, one of the highest in the world sitting at roughly 60 percent. Although the government has announced numerous efforts to promote literacy, they have yet to translate their words in action. It was a year into the pilot, and Mashall was at a crossroads. She wanted to provide kids with access to high-level, online material, but she knew they could never take full advantage of the Internet had to offer if they couldn’t comprehend English.
“I wanted to awaken their intellectual curiosity and independence, but English was the prerequisite. We needed to shift gears. I wasn’t sure how, but I had a very strong intuition that we could make this work and we were the best people to go and find out. And thankfully kids make the best customers. They give you constant feedback. They don’t have an ego. If it’s entertaining or interesting, they’re in.”
In 2014, at the end of the pilot, Mashall became an Acumen Pakistan Fellowand was introduced to men and women who were also committed to tackling Pakistan’s biggest social challenges. Meeting like-minded people made her recognize that she wasn’t alone in her efforts and realize the need for collaboration.
“I used to feel alone and thought that was perfectly fine,” she said. “Now every time I make a move there’s only ‘we.’ It’s so apparent now that it’s a movement. Pakistan is like Goliath. The problems are so huge and deeply complex, it has to be a movement.”
Getting the Reading Room Project off the ground has been a rich, learning experience for the students but more so for Mashall. Today, the enterprise has worked with more than 200 children at its community lab in Karachi and has developed and English literacy program that takes students from pre-literacy to second-grade reading and comprehension in 11 months. But Mashall has her work cut out for her—the next step is figuring out how to scale and build a sustainable company. The company currently charges each student $4 to $7 a month for their services, but Mashall is hesitant to raise the prices when low-income families spend half of their income on their children’s education although the company’s costs currently outweigh its profits.
“Now that we know more, the next steps are exponentially more difficult,” she said. “But if you want something to work, you have to have the courage of your conviction. I used to ask myself ‘What could I do to change this?’ Today, I have found the answer to that question. Education is the answer.
I had every possible opportunity for success only because I was born one neighborhood over and had access to a quality education. It’s all so random, but it locks people’s destinies. The only thing to unlock those destinies is education.”
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