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Industry experts to mentor 60 businesswomen

By Our Correspondent
January 24, 2021

LAHORE:All Pakistan Women Movement (APWM) brought together 15 industry experts and more than 60 budding women entrepreneurs under one roof at COLABS, Gulberg here on Saturday.

The established entrepreneurs who are well-known in their respective fields will mentor businesswomen. The event called Her Mentor Galore, Dream - Learn - Scale is aimed at addressing the business challenges of women and help them find solution to those challenges.

Male champions of change have stepped forward to help women-led businesses. All Pakistan Women Movement is an awareness, advocacy and capacity building initiative to increase financial inclusion and economic empowerment of women. The beautiful thing about this initiative was that businesswomen, mostly young, had registered online and were getting mentored for free. The mentors were generous enough to take out time to help the budding entrepreneurs. Above all what is wonderful is that this will continue. These 15 mentors will be helping the businesses over a period of three months through a hybrid of on-the-ground and online sessions to ensure inclusion and equity for women in society. All of them agreed that the success of an ecosystem lies in diversity and inclusion.

APWM have curated multiple programmes to help women develop their skills and find avenues to start and scale their ventures. It aims to train, support and educate women entrepreneurs. Her Mentor Galore started with an introduction by Javaria Khan, founder APWM, with Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi’s verses Khuda karay k meri arz-e-pak per utray, woh fasl-e-gul jise andesha-e-zawal na ho.

Javaria Khan linked Pakistan’s prosperity to financial independence of women. She talked about the programme APWM has designed to help women gain financial independence and the potential in Pakistani women and the impact of their work on Pakistan. The keynote address was by Andleeb Abbas, Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs, who gave three rules that she has followed and asked other women entrepreneurs to remember. “One, it all depends on how you look at things; look for opportunity in adversity and add value to something and get noticed, generate demand. Two, dare to be abnormal.” Here she praised her leader for not going for lockdown in Covid. Pakistan is doing well during Covid as compared to most countries in the world, she said. “Three, don’t be obsessed by output. The focus should be outcome. There won’t be a calamity if you don’t achieve your goals. The thing to worry about is not having a goal,” she said. “On top of all this is perseverance,” she stressed. Humayun Mazhar gave example of Bangladesh where women constitute 30-40 percent of the workforce and stated it as the reason why Bangladesh, a non-cotton growing country, is exporting far more than us. Salim Ghauri said success lays in trying again and again and not giving up. “An entrepreneur is someone who comes with an idea, who wants to bring change and the change is such that the market buys. You have to learn to take losses as well. Keep trying until you succeed,” he said. In the next part of the programme the 30 shortlisted women led startups introduced themselves and their startups. They were matched with 15 industry leaders to have one-on-one mentoring on their business ideas to take guidance to grow their ventures. The male champions of change and women leaders from the industry stepped forward to help women led businesses.

The mentors included Dr Omar Chughtai, Aftab Mahmood Butt, Shaista Ayesha, Muhammad Ijaz, Faisal Sherjan, Sadaffe Abid, Khurram Zafar, Venture Capitalist, Innovation and Entrepreneurship Evangelist, Syma Arshad, Dr Farah Arif, Javaria Khan, Ahmed Khan, Zahid Hussain, Qasif Shahid and Adnan Bashir.