Just Start.

In a nation of 200 million where nearly three-quarters of the population lives on less than $2 per day, how do you begin to imagine equitable solutions to education?

In Pakistan, the government reaches just 60% of the population; low-cost private schools have risen to fill the gap (charging $5-10 per month), but quality can be very low. Haroon Yasin, a college drop out, wouldn’t accept a divide that would leave nearly half his country without access to quality education. If no one was showing up for children’s education, he would.

As an 18-year-old Pakistani living in Islamabad, Haroon was troubled by the street kids who roamed the same middle-class neighborhood where he grew up. With $200 to his name (all of it gained from selling his textbooks after dropping out of his first year at university), he did what few others dare to do.  He followed the thread of his curiosity and decided to do something about it.

“I remember $200 was enough to get a month’s worth of rent for a building inside the slum and to paint it with bright colors and to fill it up with things children found interesting. I didn’t want these children on the street.”

In other words, Haroon just started. And then he let the work teach him.

I relate to his instinct to use a fresh coat of paint to bring a patch of beauty to those who’ve been excluded. In 1987, I started a bakery for 20 unwed mothers in a slum in Kigali, Rwanda and remember the intense sense of pride and dignity in the women who painted the place themselves. Hamdi Ulukaya, founder of Chobani yogurt company, told me he also started by painting an old factory in upstate New York, hoping it would inspire people living in a depressed town to feel a sense of possibility. Today, Chobani generates more than a billion dollars in revenue and still prioritizes hiring refugees and people from low-income communities. Beauty can be a promise, a signal that people are valued, that they are deserving.  

"In the darkness of the slum, you could see it from a mile or two away, a building that had light…Our ideological bearing lies in that slum, our compass lies in that slum…That building would not have stood out in any other place where there was perhaps an abundance of hope."

After building his first school, to gain skills and credibility, Haroon attended Georgetown University/Qatar. 

Upon his return, he spent time in many rural villages across Pakistan to gain a deeper understanding of his “customer.” And here he made an important discovery:

“I realized one thing, for some odd reason there was a buzz about phones. Phones cost $12-$15, they [the villagers] would pick one up and aspire to have it some day. We would ask why they would think of it, they didn’t even have nutrition... it struck us.”

So in 2015, Haroon founded the Orenda Project, to use technology to bridge the divide between private and public schools. 

His app, Taleemabad, has a philosophy based on the power of giving children creative freedom using cartoons and imagination as a tool for learning. The company adapts Pakistan’s K-12 national curriculum into a digital format, translating it into local languages via an app that parents download onto their cellphones. 

This work paid off. As of January 2021, more than 800,000 students had learned with Taleemabad. The app has grown and Orenda is now a franchise model.  Haroon has negotiated with three low-cost private schools to provide content and follow-up to the teachers. Schools pay an upfront fee and a small royalty for each child participating.  Taleemabad ensures quality and training. In return, schools must agree to charge below a threshold amount. Government and philanthropy can cover gaps when parents are unable to afford anything at all.

 “Schools using Taleemabad see a 70% reduction in dropout rates; and educational performance improves markedly,” Haroon told me.  

A new economy will require more than rudimentary skills and Haroon understands this, too.  The cartoon characters and stories of Taleemabad teach critical thinking and make use of the world around the children. 

"[A couple years ago] the mothers asked me if we could integrate more ethics into the curriculum. At first we did so as a separate offering. Now, we integrate moral training into every class we offer.” 

Haroon increasingly sees the role of education not only as teaching reading and writing and arithmetic, but teaching what it means to be a good human being as well. In this way, a generation of little Haroons, unafraid to follow their own curiosity can identify a big problem and decide to do something about it and just start.

And indeed, that is something we all can do. Just start. From where you are with what you have.

This is part one in Jacqueline Novogratz's monthly series on Moral Leadership, featuring a new generation of leaders for a new economy. The photos in this piece were created by Saiyna Bashir, a grantee of the Magnum Foundation, as part of a partnership to invite readers into the stories that are shaping our shared future.

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The Magnum Foundation is a nonprofit organization that expands creativity and diversity in documentary photography, activating new ideas through the innovative use of images. Through grantmaking and fellowships, the Magnum Foundation supports a global network of social justice and human rights-focused photographers, and experiments with new models for storytelling.