With that confidence came room to build the larger vision she had been carrying. MRC moved beyond the single classroom and developed its Educational Champions model, bringing the same approach into other schools and communities. That model has since reached more than 650 students. Its one-year leadership program has equipped more than 1,900 young people ages 18 to 25, and its skills and entrepreneurship work has helped launch 63 youth-led enterprises.

Then came a test no one had planned for. When schools closed during COVID-19, MRC was the first institute in the region to move its classes online, and Sumera trained mothers who had never used WhatsApp so their children could keep learning. Voice of America covered her story: the woman who had once opened a school in her sitting room was now helping her community figure out how education could continue when classrooms closed.

Sehrish Saddozai, Founder of Fareezah Education

The problem found Sehrish in her own home. Her house help's children were not in school, and when she asked why they were not attending the government school, which charges no tuition, the answer was a single missing document. The family had moved from another region and did not have B-forms, the identity documents required for school admission.

Sehrish soon realized this was not one family’s problem. Many households in Kotha Kalan, Rawalpindi, had migrated from other parts of the country, and the same missing documentation was keeping their children outside the formal school system.

She tried the obvious fix first, getting the children admitted to a local private school, where they thrived academically. But the arrangement quickly fell apart: the children did not fit in, and Sehrish came to feel that the school had taken them only for the fee.

Starting a school of her own frightened her more than paying someone else's fees ever had, but she did it anyway.

Fareezah opened in 2016 with three children. For years, Sehrish held a full-time job during the day and ran Fareezah in the evenings. She and her mother made home visits to persuade parents to enroll their children and keep them attending, while Sehrish worked to create a school that looked and felt like the formal education those families had long been excluded from.

Three students became a borrowed room, then a rented three-room apartment, and eventually a dedicated building with 18 classrooms and more than 500 students. Today, Fareezah educates an estimated 80 to 85 percent of the children in Kotha Kalan.

But as the school grew, Sehrish encountered a different kind of constraint: she had built an organization in which nearly everything still depended on her.

The Acumen Fellowship helped her recognize that building something sustainable would require a different kind of leadership.

Learning to step back did not happen all at once. During the Fellowship, she started thinking about delegation, shared responsibility and the systems a school needs to outlast the founder who built it. Afterwards, she began deliberately removing herself from decisions she had always owned and building a team capable of making them.

Today, the work is spread across the organization rather than resting on her. A core team and an advisory board work alongside her on fundraising, supervision, and strategy, while a separate management team runs the schools day to day.

Fareezah has also expanded beyond its original classrooms through university collaborations, educator training, and a fellowship program of its own. What began as one woman covering another family's school fees is becoming something larger: an institution, designed to keep working even when its founder is no longer at the center of every decision.

Maira Siddiqui, Founder of Chiragh Education

For Maira, the barrier was not access to a classroom, but the language inside it.

She grew up in an Urdu-speaking family with deep ties to the language, yet attended English-medium schools and, for years, believed English was the measure of a good education. It took leaving Pakistan for her to begin questioning that assumption.

While studying in the United States, she watched international students hold onto their own languages with pride and treat English as one more tool, rather than a replacement for their identity.

Back in Pakistan, that realization became tangible in a Karachi classroom. While teaching in schools serving low-income communities, she walked past a class where a teacher was teaching math in Urdu. The children understood. They were following along.

For Maira, it crystallized something she had been beginning to question: children who struggled in English were not necessarily struggling to learn. The language of instruction itself could be standing between them and the lesson. The children were falling behind because they were being taught in words they did not own.

She started Chiragh Education to put the mother tongue, the language children already understand, back at the center of learning.

Building the solution required her to rethink more than the curriculum. Her first app was scrapped once she realized that developing a product was only one part of the challenge; getting people to use and pay for it was another. She built again, an Urdu game-based learning app and piloting it with 600 children in Sindh, who scored around 70 percent on average.

But one of the deepest barriers was cultural:convincing parents and educators that Urdu was worth teaching in at all, against an instinct that reaches for English by reflex.

Her answer to that instinct was simple.

"We will always be Pakistani. We have to accept that and be proud of that."

The Acumen Fellowship came as Maira was confronting another challenge familiar to many founders: she had made herself responsible for solving every problem. Chiragh could only grow as quickly as she could put out fires.

Learning to trust her team changed what Chiragh could take on. Once she stopped being the bottleneck, the organization could grow beyond its initial pilot. Its learning products now reach thousands of children through cartoons, games, and classroom lessons, and the connections she built in the Foundry have also helped move the work forward.

She is currently raising a $750,000 pre-seed round to take the Chiragh Taleem app to move beyond its current national curriculum-aligned Urdu content for kindergarten through grade 5, expanding into numeracy and additional provincial languages, beginning with Sindhi.

The goal is to carry the idea that first took shape in that Karachi classroom much further: children should have the chance to build foundational skills in languages they already understand. And because Chiragh Taleem is offline-first, children can access that learning even without an internet connection.

Three founders, three forms of leadership

Sumera, Sehrish, and Maira show what becomes possible when moral imagination meets relentless execution. Each began with the same small refusal: to do something for a community others had written off, and to build it rather than wait for someone else to. Each moved before the funding or the permission arrived, and each stayed long enough to turn one idea into an institution meant to outlast her. The literacy gap is only where they started. What they are building gives the next generation of Pakistan the confidence to lead, the pride to hold on to who they are, and a real chance at the future.

Sumera, Sehrish, and Maira began with different problems: who gets access to education, what it takes to build an institution that lasts, and what happens when children are expected to learn in a language that distances them from the lesson. Their journeys through the Acumen Fellowship were different, too.

For Sumera, the shift was finding the conviction and language to stand behind a larger vision. For Sehrish, it was learning that building an institution meant allowing it to depend less on her. For Maira, it was trusting a team enough to let the organization grow beyond what she could carry alone.

What connects them is not simply that each identified a gap in Pakistan’s education system. It is what they did next: starting before the resources, certainty, or permission were in place, learning as they built, and turning deeply personal encounters with a problem into organizations capable of reaching far beyond the people who first inspired them to begin.

Their work is still growing. But each is already expanding what education can look like in Pakistan: who gets to enter the classroom, whose language belongs there, and who has the confidence and opportunity to shape what comes next.