Millennial Exclusive: Interview with CIRCLE CEO Sadaffe Abid
Sadaffe Abid is the Founder of CIRCLE Pakistan, a Karachi based social enterprise that works to improve women’s economic rights in Pakistan. Before CIRCLE, she was one of the founding members of Kashf Foundation, one of Pakistan’s largest micro-finance institutions, rising to become its CEO. She also served as Gulf Representative of Mercy Corps and a Consultant for IFC. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Mount Holyoke College and a master’s degree from the Harvard Kennedy School, where she served as a teaching fellow for a course in Adaptive Leadership.
With CIRCLE, Sadaffe has launched several media campaigns such as #ElevatePak and Strong Women, Strong Pakistan. They have started Women in Business chapters in several large cities and established mentorship programs within organizations. CIRCLE’s latest ventures include She Loves Tech, a global startup competition aimed at female-led startups and startups that focus on women’s issues, as well as an initiative to teach technology skills to young women from low income families.
Editor of millennialpk, Shahrukh Wani sat down with Sadaffe Abid for an interview.
The transcript has been edited for clarity purposes.
Shahrukh: I would love to start with your background. A bit of your childhood, growing up , what made you go into the social sector in the first place?
Sadaffe: I was born into a military family. I came from a simple background. We had posting stations in Noushera, Khariaan, Rawalpindi, then back to Khariaan where I went to an army school, then to a government school. The first time I went to a private school was Beaconhouse in 7th grade, so you know I had a quite a basic schooling. My parents were very interested in education, so that focus was always there. My father actually wanted to be a journalist and he ended up in the military because he didn’t have enough money for FC College so he had to drop out. But after he retired he joined Beaconhouse as a principal, which is something he really enjoyed. Two years later he joined the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.
Shahrukh: Oh really? HRCP that sounds interesting.
Sadaffe: He worked extensively as a volunteer also looking at Pakistan — India peace initiatives and promoting human rights. I think that was always an inspiration for me when I went for my undergrad to Mount Holyoke on a scholarship. I wanted to come back to Pakistan. I wanted to work here in the development sector. It was something I was passionate about. I did an internship with Asma Jahangir which was a very eye opening experience. We went to Multan Jail, we made case studies of women. We asked what were they doing there? What were their issues? We went to their shelters for women and asked, what were their challenges? So with that it really got me thinking about what one can do in terms of solving these issues.
Shahrukh: Thats very interesting. So, when you came back from Mount Holyoke. I’m sure you could have had other opportunities, better opportunities. Kashf at that time wasn’t very well known. It was a very small organisation. So why did you join Kashaf?
Sadaffe: When I came back I started working with Mr Shahid Kardar, he is a great economist and has also served as State Bank Governor. He became a mentor to me. We did projects for the World Bank and Asian Development Bank. It was great exposure. I went to places I’ve never been before. They made us study Bahawalpur and Rawalpindi’s demands for education amongst low income families, looking at quality of schooling. Again, an eye opening experience with studies on social sector in different parts of Pakistan. I travelled, I got to see the country, and it was great but I also realised that these projects, these big development programs coming in, donor funded, didn’t have a lot of impact on the ground. We saw many things that were not working well and that was disappointing. So, I thought, I want to be a part of something that I can influence. I could help create and drive change.
It was Shahid Kardar who suggested Kashf, which had just started out, to me. I went and I met Roshaneh, in Kashf’s two small rooms, and I really liked the mission of the foundation and the mission of working with low income women. Providing them with microfinance was really exciting to me so I joined the foundation. In the beginning, it was something no one could understand. My family were not so sure about my decision because, as you said, no one knew Kashf; they had no idea what this organization was trying to do.
Shahrukh: Not just Kashf, I suppose the even the micro-finance sector wasn’t very big back then.
Sadaffe: Yes, microfinance wasn’t very well known. I took a big pay cut and as a young professional, just one a half years, into my career. I remember when I started with Kashf, my salary was Rs 7500 while I was earning Rs 30,000 working as a consultant.
Shahrukh: So you took almost a 70% pay cut?
Sadaffe: Jee!
Shahrukh: Now that’s determination. So you worked with Kashaf for 12 years and you eventually ended up leading the organization. So can you tell me a little about your experience in working in micro finance and little about the importance of enterprise in Pakistan?
Sadaffe: My experience with Kashf has taught me many things at many different levels and I am very grateful for this journey. We started from two small rooms and grew to cater to 300,000 women and deploy $200 million. We were 7 team members when I began and we were a 2000 member team when I was COO and later CEO. As COO, I was handling operations, research, new product development and human resource. It was very exciting; learning, growing with the organization, developing and creating impact and building double bottom line organization. We were the first financially sustainable microfinance organization in Pakistan and amongst few globally. That itself a big thing for our organization and Pakistan. And I think Kashf showed that low income women, women at the bottom of the pyramid are resilient, resourceful, creative. And they pay back. This wasn’t charity, this wasn’t handouts; they paid back. This was a great lesson and it inspired and encouraged many other players in the market, lot of innovation came in the industry. You learn, grow and experiment.
Shahrukh: That’s a great legacy to have. So after Kashaf, you went to Harvard.
Sadaffe: It was a great experience, the Kennedy school is all about developing the spirit in you so you can solve big problems; so you can bring innovative ideas and have the right mindset. They encourage you for that. It was a great experience for me to be in that environment, which was very invigorating but also realistic. I studied Adaptive Leadership which was taught by Prof Ron Heifetz and is one of the most influential courses in the entire Harvard community. It is about how to exercise leadership and make progress especially where you know it’s difficult to make progress and where there is not much progress. I also became a teaching assistant and worked closely with my professor which gave me lots of insights.
Post-Kennedy school my husband and I, we moved to Dubai, and in Dubai I had to reinvent myself. Because Dubai is not about microfinance.
Shahrukh: Everything is about big finance.
Sadaffe: Yeah, big things. I had to sort of rethink how I could be of value in this region. That was difficult and it was challenging. I realised how much of my identity was linked to microfinance, to Kashf. And I didn’t have that anymore.
I had no idea where to begin, what next steps to take and that’s when I went back to the Kennedy school for winter course. I worked with my professor again, for a couple of weeks, on the leadership program, so I brushed up, and then strung up and thought, let’s run leadership programs for women. That was very interesting because when I started doing leadership programs in Dubai, we had women from PwC, PEPSICO, Dell, and some women start-ups and I started noticing that women are underestimating themselves.
When I first started with Kashf, the first thing we had to do was build confidence for our women clients. It’s not just women at the bottom of the pyramid who underestimated themselves, it was also women who were very capable, economically strong, educated, accomplished and high energy who were underestimating themselves.
I did a lot more research and found that there were not enough women in leadership roles. I also found that if you were a woman in a leadership role, it would have direct impact on the company’s performance and financial and goals. Men and women, together, can really create inclusively strong businesses. That’s what it’s really about.
Shahrukh: What would you say if you want to summarise the whole issue?
Sadaffe: I think this is a very complex issue and it requires multiple interventions and studies. The good thing is that there’s a lot more focus on gender both internationally and locally. This is something companies are beginning to look at. The discussion is beginning to happen, and that is something CIRCLE also helps create and facilitate.
We started doing a program with Alliance Francaise Karachi this year and we kicked it off with a session on Women and Economy. These sort of dialogues are very important but you need to think, how do we make change and engage different stakeholders?
This is where Pakistan has huge potential and we have not tapped into it. Women are the next growth market; women are Pakistan’s biggest strength. It’s untouched and we need to create platforms of opportunities so they can grow. CIRCLE is working on increasing women in the economy. We have campus chapters and we have young women reaching out to us on social media, saying, “How can we work for CIRCLE? What can we do? We love the mission!”
We’re trying to get them [women] mentorship, give them role models.
Shahrukh: So one of things which we find when we do research is the disparities between the number of women university graduates and those who go on to enter the workplace. Does the corporate sector have to do more in order to change this?
Sadaffe: I think that’s a big issue. We don’t have many women joining the workforce for various reasons, whether its constraints from their families, who say that the work environment is not safe and secure, or mobility concerns. How does a women get to work in a safe, secure, affordable way? Even I when I started my career, my mother would pick and drop me. I thought, I can’t do this, so I went by rickshaw. The rickshaw took 40% of my salary for the first month. Then I started using the mini bus and realized that as a woman I had access to only two seats. I had to then walk home for fifteen minutes and that was so challenging as women experience street harassment.
The dramas that we watch, they don’t show women as role models. They show that they are having very difficult lives
I think this is where the government’s role comes in and it is very important. There needs to be a good, affordable transportation system and we need a massive campaign on educating people about treating women well and giving them the respect. This is good for families, communities and society. When women grow, nations progress. And look at the media! The dramas that we watch, they don’t show women as role models. They show them having very difficult lives. Their husband are getting married the second or third time and the women are not economically able to stand on their feet. Let’s instead show women in leadership positions.
Shahrukh: In one area of gender equality we do seem to do well is political participation. Perhaps, its because we’re have a lot of women who have broken the glass celling. Women in politics have had their role amplified but in other sectors role models are usually not promoted to the same extent.
Sadaffe: We need to bring role models in other sectors out for sure. This shows how technology can be really good. At CIRCLE, we run a campaign called ‘Strong Women, Strong Pakistan’. We are really active on social media because we have realised that technology can be a great enabler. In fact, CIRCLE is starting a pet project for young women, women who are from low income families — teaching them tech skills so they can stand on their feet combined with life skills like problem solving, ability to deal with failure.
Shahrukh: Ah! Brilliant. This tech industry tends to be dominated by men.
Sadaffe: Yeah, we aim to reach out to 10,000 young women by 2020.
Shahrukh: So in 10 years, where do you want to expand? In certain areas? In certain geographies perhaps?
Sadaffe: We are a local organisation. We’re looking at local issues but we bring in innovations and ideas from other countries and, in fact, we also experiment because I really believe that Pakistan can make a lot of progress. We have a lot of talent but it needs mentorship and platforms. And technology offers a lot of possibility.
We would really like to support more women startups to scale their enterprises, grow jobs for Pakistan, have more women in business chapters, provide skills and entrepreneurship to women and become the go-to company for women in the economy.
Shahrukh: That’s very interesting. So when you look at start-ups, the ecosystem in Pakistan. Do you see that its more gender-balanced than the corporate sector? Or is there a disparity there too?
Sadaffe: There is a lot of [female] interest in startups but we need to look at enterprises that have a business model that allows them to scale. There is still a lot more work to done.
I would say there a lot of women in small businesses. I think it’s a good start because any woman who is setting up something is bringing her ideas and that’s great, but we need to build scalable enterprises. We need to create jobs and we need to grow businesses that are expanding and generating high growth companies.
Its important to remind yourself that you have capabilities and potential so believe in yourself
Shahrukh: So what advice will you give to young women who would want to start their careers, just who are just out of college?
Sadaffe: I‘d say believe in yourself. You will always experience opinions of doubt. Where we question our self. Its important to remind yourself that you have capabilities and potential so believe in yourself. Second I would is you know, network is vey important. It’s very very important to connect with people. Networking is very important. So build your networks. Go to university when an event is happening. A seminar.
Be curious. Go out there and be proud of it. Ask the questions! Be part of it. Ask a question when you’re sitting in it. Don’t just be an observer. Just ask a question. Put yourself in the game.
Then, I would say find one or two people who will mentor you. This, again, happens by asking good questions, showing interest, taking initiative. When you’re in university its very easy to keep your head down and focus on your exams and getting good grades. There is a life beyond that. This, right now, is, unfortunately, not what people are learning in universities, and this is not just in Pakistan!
In Pakistan it’s probably exaggerated, so my message to young people would be — this is for men and women — take advantage of social media. Get on platforms that are interesting and engage on those platforms. You need to go beyond the task at hand.
You need to be doing that, you need to go beyond the task at hand. And then my other message would be that men and women need to support each other. And more women need to support each other.
Shahrukh: So I think one of thing you touched upon is confidence gap, I read an excerpt from a book about confidence gaps, something of the sort. That women even if they do the work they often don’t feel confident enough to get the credit and men feel over confident to the need to take the credit of the entire group; and is that what you believe it to be a big problem?
Sadaffe: So what this means is and this is what we go through in our leadership programs, we make women aware of some of these patterns, some of these deep root patterns so you can do something about it. If I am amore aware, that you know that women underestimate themselves and are willing to do something about it. I’ll tell you even in Dubai I remember the PEPSICO head was saying that I have so many men who are coming and saying, “Where’s my career going?” “What’s next?”. Women in capable positions are coming up but they are not applying.
Can help do something about this. There’s a criteria, a women behaves a certain way she says she that I had to go to 3 out 5 to get better then I will apply. And men will simply say that he got 3 out 5 and then simply would go for it. So these are things that I think slowly the awareness is happening and and we need to work on some of these things. Yeah.
Shahrukh: So there are a lot of things. Lets look back for a minute. On your self. On your career and your entire life. When you were, I just want to know, I think we talked about advice already but do you have any regrets or anything you would have done slightly differently when you were just out of college and starting to build your career and and that could be advice for other people too.
Sadaffe: You know I was very lucky that I, right after college I worked with Shahid Kardar. He was a wonderful mentor and I worked on some great projects and then I joined Kashf and became part of its founding team and you know as a young person it was such an amazing journey. You know your journey in a company and I didn’t even know I was becoming an entrepreneur let alone a social entrepreneur. I was challenged at every moment had to learn how to build a great team and and build an organisation.
For questions email us at wani@cyap.org.pk or DM the writer Here
