Last week I attended a Silicon Valley fundraiser by iCodeGuru, a Pakistani-American group focusing on arranging training and guiding young men and women from underprivileged backgrounds to get full scholarships for advanced STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) degrees at universities in America. The well-attended event held at Chandni restaurant raised over $180,000. It featured iCodeGruru alumni who shared their success stories.
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| iCodeGuru Alumna Afsheen Ghuman Speaking at Silicon Valley Fundraiser. |
The story of Afsheen Ghuman from Gujranwala shows how a poor girl from a small town can succeed in defying the odds with a little help from iCodeGuru team headed by Dr. Zafar Shahid. She was able to take advantage of the online platform remotely from her home. She is now studying at an American university with a fully funded scholarship. iCodeGuru uses its online platform to offer advice, training and financial assistance to get advanced technical education, scholarships and initial funding for successful candidates to come to the United States. Currently, there are 22,000 students signed up for help via the iCodeGuru platform.
There are several similar efforts underway by Silicon Valley Pakistani-Americans to help build Pakistan's human capital in technology. Ashar Aziz Foundation, created and funded by Pakistani-American technology entrepreneur Ashar Aziz, has sponsored Advanced AI Bootcamps at the National University of Science and Technology (NUST) in Islamabad. The bootcamp series not only provides theoretical knowledge but also emphasizes practical, project-based learning, according to NUST.
The first AI bootcamp, which focused on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), was successfully completed at NUST in November 2023. The second bootcamp provided participants with in-depth knowledge and hands-on experience in the development and application of LLMs (Large Language Models). Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences & Technology (GIKI) also joined this initiative in 2024, conducting its own DNN-focused bootcamp. Participants have the opportunity to work with advanced technologies, including access to a 10xH100 NVIDIA GPU AI supercomputer, ensuring they are well-prepared to tackle real-world challenges in AI. As part of its ongoing efforts, NUST plans to partner with additional universities across Pakistan to further scale this initiative, ensuring that more students have access to high-quality AI training, according to NUST.
Smaller towns in Pakistan are also setting up AI programs with the help of Pakistani-Americans. For example, Stanford educated AI expert Shoaib Lari and Silicon Valley based technology executive Jalil Shaikh have helped Islamia University Bahawalpur start an AI program. Jalil Shaikh is now working with US-based companies to place the first group of graduates from this program.
STEM education underlies Artificial Intelligence. Pakistan stands 4th in the world with 642,562 students enrolled in STEM courses– behind Nigeria (675,371), the US (4,639,771) and India (6,000,967), according to Coursera's Global Skills Report 2023. My own estimate based on HEC data is that STEM enrollment in Pakistan exceeds one million.
Related Links:
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Digital Pakistan 2022: Broadband Penetration Soars to 90% of 15+ Population
STEM Enrollment in Pakistan Exceeds One Million
Digital Public Infrastructure in Pakistan
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Pakistan at 75
Growing Presence of Pakistani Women in Science and Technology
Riaz Haq's Youtube Channel
16 comments:
Like everything else going on in Pakistan, your story is entirely focused outside of Sindh and Balochistan, showing Punjab's tendency to treat the latter as their colonies.
Shams: "Like everything else going on in Pakistan, your story is entirely focused outside of Sindh and Balochistan, showing Punjab's tendency to treat the latter as their colonies"
Who's stopping you from launching similar programs specifically for Sindh and Balochistan?
Hello Riaz,
On behalf of iCodeGuru, I want to sincerely thank you for attending our fundraising dinner and for your generous donation. Your support is invaluable to us and plays a vital role in helping us achieve our goal of helping students who have fire in the belly.
Thanks to your kindness, we have raised so far $180k and are very close to our goal of $200k. We are optimistic to achieve our goals in next few days as funds are still coming through Benevity and other donation channels. This amount will directly contribute to to help students who have secured USA fully funded scholarships with initial expenses . Your generosity and commitment to our mission are truly inspiring.
As a token of our appreciation, we want to assure you that a receipt for your donation will be sent to you via USPS in the coming days. We are incredibly grateful for your support and look forward to seeing you at future events.
So kind of you Riaz!!
Thank you for the article and words of support. Also here is the update link for the IUB AI Program https://aicohort.tech/
Profit
@Profitpk
About 8.6% of Pakistanis over the age of 25 have a bachelor's degree or higher. It is a growing number, with college graduates increasing by three times the population growth rate. What does this mean for Pakistan, especially in the age of AI? {THREAD}
https://x.com/Profitpk/status/1895013898937397564
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The state of higher education in Pakistan
How educated is the Pakistani workforce, and what is it prepared for, especially in the age of AI?
February 24, 2025
Farooq Tirmizi
By Farooq Tirmizi
https://profit.pakistantoday.com.pk/2025/02/24/the-state-of-higher-education-in-pakistan/
The college-educated Pakistani is not yet the majority, but is rapidly becoming part of the norm.
More than half a million Pakistanis graduate from a college or university every year with at least a two-year college degree. A little more than 11% of 30-year-olds in Pakistan have at least a two-year college degree and, judging by the fact that the number of graduates is growing at three times the population growth rate, that number will likely keep on rising for every subsequent generation of 30-year-olds in the country.
So what do those statistics mean? It is by now cliché to assume that the quality of higher education in Pakistan is not good (partly true) and that while the country has a lot of raw talent, the country is not prepared for the rapid advancement of technology that will necessitate a much better trained workforce than the one we have now.
There is no denying the fact that education – both in terms of quality and quantity – is lacking in Pakistan. It is the contention of this publication, expressed through previous analytical writings, however, that the situation can be described as not ideal, but far from hopeless.
While in previous articles we have covered basic literacy and numeracy, in this piece will cover higher education, placing it in both historical context relative to where it has been in Pakistan’s own past, as well as the global context: where Pakistan stands relative to peer economies and geographic neighbours.
We will then examine a question often left unasked: exactly how well-educated does the median Pakistani need to be, given where the country is in its economic evolution? And how has the answer to that question changed with the advent of the recent, more visible, rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI)?
Education in Pakistan: Not good, but maybe good enough - Profit by Pakistan Today
https://profit.pakistantoday.com.pk/2024/08/05/education-in-pakistan-not-good-but-maybe-good-enough/
Not waiting for government favours
While part of this progress is certainly driven by improvements to the government’s own infrastructure, measured purely by proportion of the increase in student enrollment, the private sector has contributed just under 75% of the total growth in enrollment between 2009 and 2022, according to enrollment estimates published in the Pakistan Education Statistics reports published by the Pakistan Institute of Education. The public sector accounts for the remaining 25%.
In other words, Pakistanis are not waiting around for the government to fix the schools (even though the government is making some progress on that front). They are simply going ahead and paying for private schools themselves as soon as they have the ability to pay.
This phenomenon helps explain why the fastest progress in terms of increasing literacy happened in the decade after Pakistan’s dependency ratios – the ratio of prime working age adults to the number of children under the age of 15 and retirees over the age of 65 – peaked.
The dependency ratio peaked in 1995, and that year also represented the an inflection point in literacy improvements: for every year after that, the 10-year progress towards improving literacy kept on rising at a rising pace (the second differential was positive) for the next decade.
What does that mean? It means that once families started to find that they had a bit more spare cash to spend (with dependency ratios declining after 1995), they started investing that spare cash into private school fees for their children, especially in urban areas, and especially in the urban areas they did so at nearly identical rates for their sons and daughters.
Having spent the lead up to 1995 being increasingly cash strapped, the first thing that Pakistani families did when the pressure on their cash flows eased a bit was to invest in the future economic productivity of their households by educating their children. And in perhaps a scathing indictment of how bad the public schools were, they did so through private schools even when public schools were available in their areas.
Dear Sir
Sorry to say but unfortunately this is true, and I think the reason why these overseas Pakistanis specially those living in America and who are in the field of technology and IT are actually funding research facilities and startups mostly in the universities of Punjab province in Pakistan and this is most probably because the government of Punjab is offering overseas Pakistanis lot of benefits ,incentives and facilities specially to overseas Pakistani IT professionals which Sindh government is not offering to overseas Pakistanis.
So the only option left for these overseas Pakistanis is to fund and invest in universities and institutes in Punjab province.
Thank you Sir for your comments and compliments both.
I think previous president Dr. Arif Alvi's "Presidential Initiative for Artificial Intelligence and Computing"
(https://www.piaic.org/) may have also played a role.
Zamir
Dear Sir
What I think is that their should be restructuring of education system and this can start from HEC.
Sir I hope you remember, I came up with an advice and idea about having teacher evaluation cell and student evaluation cell.
Each of these cell specially that of student evaluation cell must have a child pyscologist or child specialist who could actually assess and scrutinise the mental condition of those students who are performing poorly at schools and in other academic circles.
This student evaluation cell must connect and communicate with both princess of schools and colleges and with the parents of the children.
Their should be a meeting between team of student evaluation cell, teachers, principles and parents where they could discuss about how to improve the academic performance of students.
Salam Sir
Also I think the teacher evaluation cell or counsel that is to be set up must keep a check and balance on the overall performance of the teachers who are teaching in colleges and schools.
And I also believe and think that these teacher evaluation cells and studenfs evaluation cells must be independent of any government control and influence in order to maintain and continue its competence ans performance.
And I think their must also be a feedback forum for students asking them whether they have understood what the teacher has taught them or not?
Salam Sir
Sorry to say but government of Pakistan has mostly focused and paid attention to constructing more numbers of schools, colleges and universities instead of focusing on the quality and standard of the already present and existing schools, colleges and universities.
The amount of money or budget that this government of Pakistan spends on the construction and building of new schools, colleges and universities , if this same amount is spent on the improvement of the quality of the existing schools, colleges and universities in Pakistan, then I think the problem will be reduced to great extent.
The government of Pakistan already spends much less amount of its GDP or budget on research and development.
Salam Sir
I hope you and the entire team of this blog is doing well, Sir I hope you remember I posted about RONIN a tech company in Pakistan which is mash Allah making many tech and electronic products like ear buds, ear phones, smart watches and etc.
The CEO of this company is a Pakistani.
Can you pls make a blog about it?
Thanks
Pakistan Launches Its First Homegrown AI Chatbot Zehanat AI Tailored for Local Needs
https://propakistani.pk/2025/03/22/pakistan-launches-its-first-homegrown-ai-chatbot-tailored-for-local-needs/
Pakistan has achieved a notable milestone in the tech sector with the beta launch of Zahanat AI, the nation’s first locally developed artificial intelligence chatbot. Spearheaded by entrepreneur Mehwish Salman Ali, co-founder and CEO of Data Vault and Zahanat AI, the platform promises to address Pakistan’s unique challenges with culturally sensitive and locally relevant solutions.
Zahanat AI is the culmination of years of development, operating from a dedicated data center in Karachi since 2022. This means that the AI model’s data stays in Pakistan for processing and doesn’t go anywhere else. This data center is connected with high-speed internet and has robust DDoS protection.
The system utilizes a mixed GPU architecture, leveraging both Nvidia GPUs and chips, initially incorporating used gaming GPUs to build its computational power. It was a relatively low-cost development project. The owners said that DeepSeek cost $5 million to make, but Zahanat AI cost less, without specifying exactly how much.
Mehwish Salman Ali said:
Our goal was to create an AI that understands and responds to the specific needs of Pakistan. Zahanat AI is trained on a massive dataset of 2 billion parameters, all processed and stored within Pakistan, ensuring cultural awareness and relevance.
A key distinguishing feature of Zahanat AI is its focus on ethical and responsible AI development. The platform is specifically trained to censor sensitive topics and avoid discussions about particular individuals.
The beta launch of Zahanat AI is currently on an invitational basis, requiring interested users to submit their email and personal details, including their profession, work email, and social media accounts. This selective access aims to gather valuable feedback and refine the platform before a wider public release.
ALSO READ
Baidu’s New AI Model “Rivals Deepseek At Half the Price”
Ali further explained:
By training Zahanat AI on Pakistan’s data, we are building a tool that can provide Pakistan-focused solutions to the diverse problems faced by our communities. We believe this technology has the potential to transform various sectors, from education and healthcare to business and governance.
For now, the beta launch has introduced Zahanat AI’s initial Z1 model, with plans to improve and expand further in the future with Z2 and so on. The Z2 model will introduce multilingual support for all languages in Pakistan and will get voice input as well.
Salam Sir
Mash Allah a good news, their is a Pakistani student named " HASHIR ETHISHAM" who is actually a cloud innovator in Google company and an AI student in Harvard University.
He is only 18 years old and has worked on some AI based projects.
Sir can you pls make a blog about him?
Thanks
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