Meet GES Delegate: Hira Batool Rizvi
Name: Hira Batool Rizvi
Twitter handle: Hira Batool Rizvi
Country of Origin: Pakistan
Organization Name: She`Kab
Organization Website: www.shekab.com
Brief Description of Organization:
Transportation remains to be one of the major bottlenecks in the success of an ordinary Pakistani working woman. By leveraging the power of technology, She`Kab aims to solve this problem. She`Kab is a web-based technology platform that connects female riders to drivers by intelligent clustering and matching. By providing safe, reliable, and affordable transport solutions, She`Kab aims to foster empowerment. The company generates employment opportunities for drivers, eases transportation woes facing the riders, and lowers gender disparity in the workforce.
What inspired you to start this organization? When I first started working in Islamabad, I noticed that all the women around me talked constantly about commuting problems. That’s because, in Pakistan, it can be difficult for women to get to work — and make a living for themselves and their families. I knew I wanted to help these and other women around me. But it wasn’t until I saw ride-sharing services in the U.S. like Uber and Lyft that I learned how to go about it. I saw what they were doing and thought we needed something along the same lines, but more culturally sensitive. We see She`Kab directly empowering working women by addressing a systemic transportation problem that exists in Pakistan. We believe empowering women and girls to lead is crucial for a society to progress.
What is the next big step you hope to help your organization reach? At the moment, the company is operational in the twin cities, where it partners with drivers from the pre-existing taxi infrastructure. The company is currently operational in the twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi with a fleet of 20 partner cabs. By the end of next year, She`Kab aims to introduce a fleet of 60 partner cabs and get sponsorship for 10 secondhand cars, to meet the transportation needs of at least 5,000 working women in the twin cities. There are around 300,000 women in the twin cities who are in need of such services.
What has been your biggest obstacle as an entrepreneur? Two of our biggest challenges have been raising investment locally and understanding our business valuation. She`Kab is bootstrapped till date, and to scale up our social enterprise quickly, we ultimately need investment. However, raising investment in Pakistan is not easy. While we have come across a couple of interested local investors, we have also realized that in nascent entrepreneurial ecosystems, the dynamics associated with local investment/seed-funding is hazy for entrepreneurs and the investors alike.
What advice would you give other emerging entrepreneurs? Much like traditional entrepreneurs, aspiring entrepreneurs often wait for the right time/resources/funding to come together before taking their ideas into the market. I’d suggest changing this mindset. In the day and age that we live in, it has become extremely important to learn the needs of customers, in order to produce what Seth Godin calls the ‘purple cow’: something that stands out among the competition. This product is called a minimum viable product which you take to the market in an unfinished form investing very little money on it. Once we satisfy and tweak according to market responses, we can start writing that business plan, getting together a team, and looking up to investors.
