The mission came first.
The tech followed.
- Three graduate degrees — international development & sociology
- Only Pakistani org selected for AI Opportunity Fund: Asia-Pacific
- Funded by AVPN, Google.org, ISOC & Asian Development Bank
- Founded in Lasbela — built for the world
- Founder of five live digital platforms across two continents
I came to AI through development work — not the other way around. After years studying how communities are shaped by systems of power and exclusion, I watched artificial intelligence become the most consequential of those systems. The question underneath all of my work has always been the same: who gets left out?
Urdu AI started from that gap — and grew into Pakistan’s leading AI literacy platform, now reaching over one million people through social media, a weekly newsletter, a mobile app, and workshops across the country. The largest Urdu-language AI education community in the world, built without a venture round and without corporate backing.
220 million people speak Urdu. Almost none of the world’s AI education reaches them. So I built the infrastructure to change that.
Then came PakSpeed — because you cannot talk about digital inclusion without honest data on who actually has connectivity and who doesn’t. In its first seven days, Pakistan’s first community-owned internet speed monitoring network logged over 15,000 tests. Real data. Real accountability. Built for the people it measures.
WANG and its innovation lab WALI have been working on the ground for years — girls’ education, flood rehabilitation housing, rural digital literacy, and youth leadership in communities where the digital divide is not a statistic but a daily reality. Trusted and funded by Internet Society, AVPN, and Google.
Different platforms. Different communities. One conviction: AI should belong to everyone who needs it.