Pakistani Women of Inspiration
Sheba Najmi: Redefining The Tech. Landscape Through Code for Pakistan
San Francisco, California
October 16th, downtown Houston, I was on my way to the final event celebrating the end of the Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) of Women in Computing Conference 2015. At GHC, I joined twelve thousand of the smartest women in computing from sixty one countries and was still overwhelmed by three days of learning new things, industry exposure, and the excitement of meeting some of the smartest women engineers on this planet. I was constantly thinking, how can someone bring such energy to the computing community in Pakistan? (I got my answer after this interview).
I was still deeply indulged in my thoughts when I noticed the person walking next to me. Since we both had a common destination, I preferred breaking the silence and started a conversation with her. Her name was Amy Mok and after a few lines of introduction, I asked her what was her favourite part of GHC; she said Sheryl Sandberg’s keynote. Yes, I agreed. We continued to have a casual conversation until she mentioned she was a fellow for Code for America (CfA) in 2014. I was thrilled! (You will know why). I asked her to tell me more about the fellowship program and when I looked too curious, she wondered if I was interested in applying for the fellowship. I told her it’s not that I want to apply but that I know someone from Pakistan who was a CfA fellow. She instantly said, “Oh you know Sheba?” Bang! I said “Yes!” and for the next few minutes we talked about so many good things about Sheba and her initiative of Code for Pakistan (CfP). Why was I so excited? Because I was flying back home the next day and was scheduled to interview Sheba Najmi the day after. My conversation with Amy that day and talking to Sheba that week can be summed up as: “we live in such a small world”, “Sheba sounds really amazing”, “fate conspired that day, me and Amy walking right next to each other was not a coincidence”, and “attending GHC was not the most amazing experience I had that week, talking to Sheba was”.
Sheba is a Stanford University graduate, a veteran user experience designer and product strategist, Code for America fellow, an entrepreneur and most importantly the founder of Code for Pakistan and this is her story!
Sheba Najmi, Founder Code for Pakistan
Love of Mathematics
Before her journey to one of the top universities in the world, Sheba was a student at St. Joseph’s Convent School in Karachi, Pakistan. She was really good at studies especially Mathematics and Chemistry, but unlike other students in her class, she was not compelled to take the medicine track (a popular choice among bright female students in Pakistan). Though she initially joined Aga Khan University’s School of Medicine, she later left. She wanted to do something more challenging and stimulating and had a strong desire to expand her knowledge about the world. Then, she chose Mathematics!
Life at Stanford
A scholarship brought Sheba to California, USA to pursue her undergraduate studies at Stanford University. Her love of Mathematics and computers, her desire to learn more about the world, her depth of knowledge in classic literature and education, and her interest in interaction between humans and computers and their impact on each other led her to study the field of Symbolic Systems. At Stanford, Symbolic Systems is considered to be one of the toughest disciplines, as it combines faculty and courses from demanding domains like Computer Science, Linguistics, Philosophy, Psychology, Communication, Statistics, and Education. Sheba not only thrived at her course work, but also won several awards and scholarships and finished her undergraduate studies with honors. Later, she graduated in the same discipline with a focus on human-computer interaction.
When I asked Sheba about her time at Stanford, she recalled it to be an amazing learning experience. She was a research and a teaching assistant during her graduate studies and felt challenged to learn more in order to be a better teacher to her students. This helped her push herself further and acquire knowledge of new things.
Brief and Fun Time Joining Media
Sheba came back to Pakistan after finishing her undergraduate studies at Stanford and joined Indus News as a news anchor, a reporter and a show host. The landscape for broadcast news media was changing in Pakistan at the turn of the century. Sheba enjoyed this exciting time in Pakistan hosting daily shows and taking to the streets of Karachi interviewing people on hard hitting issues. But in 2003, she decided to move back to Silicon Valley for graduate studies.
Major Career Move, Yahoo!
Sheba’s first major career move was with Yahoo! in the midst of Silicon Valley as an interaction designer. She later became a lead designer for Yahoo! Mail, the company’s flagship service with over 280 million users. In the 2000s, Yahoo! was the leading technology company and Yahoo! Mail was the company’s bread and butter. Designing the user experience for Yahoo! Mail and leading its projects was a phenomenal experience for Sheba. She built new strengths, excelled at her existing technical and leadership skills and took major initiatives for her team’s success during her six and a half years at Yahoo!. She was one of the first at Yahoo! to teach an offshore quality assurance team about user experience. She was also the main resource behind designing Yahoo! Mail’s localization and bi-directional interfaces to support Arabic font.
Yahoo! Campus, Sunnyvale, California, USA
Code for America Fellowship
With her family’s history in Malawi and India, and her youth spent in Pakistan, Sheba’s roots were firmly planted in the developing world. Thus, she was aware of the inequalities and challenges of living in a society where even the basic necessities of life are not accessible to many. She grew up with a fierce desire to make things better, and as a child she often wished to be Prime Minister of Pakistan so she could make things right.
After six and a half years as a UX Designer at Yahoo!, Sheba set out in search of what was at the heart of her passion, enabling technology that would have a more meaningful impact on human lives. When she came across CfA (which started the global Code for All network), she immediately loved their mission. She knew that by joining CfA she would have the opportunity to work with brilliant and diverse minds towards a common civic goal, creating solutions that make a real difference to citizens. In her own words, “accepting the Code for America fellowship offer was without a doubt the best decision I have ever made in my life”.
Joining CfA is not an easy process, the competition is fierce, the interview process is long and drilling, and only a few out of hundreds of candidates get accepted every year. Sheba was among them in year 2012. CfA fellows come from diverse domains and multiple disciplines but share one common mission, to change the world by changing their communities. Sheba became the Project Lead on Honolulu Answers, a free Web app for the city that uses Google-like search to direct citizens to specific reader-friendly answers that are crowdsourced and vetted by the city. Due to its usefulness, many other cities including the City of Oakland, the Lambayeque region in Peru, Anchorage, and the KPK Government have already re-deployed Honolulu Answers and more cities have shown interest in adopting it. Honolulu Answers has become a real template for people to find easy answers to questions about city services and information.
During the year long fellowship, Sheba learnt about building startups, government and civic innovation. It became obvious to her that the daily lives of citizens are so dependent on the government to provide them with the basic necessities of life like education, security, electricity, water and sewerage etc, and there is no reason that the government should be left behind in the use and implementation of technology. The idea behind projects like Honolulu Answers is to bridge the gap between public and private sectors in their effective use of technology and bring the public sector up to speed in the use of innovative open source technologies. She also found that the widely held impression about civic institutions that they resist change and are against the use of latest technology and new ideas is not 100% accurate. There are many change agents within these institutions who are passionate about bringing technological innovation to their institutions but are bogged down by the system. Also, not all civic institutions have enough resources to invest and ideas to solve every issue related to making its citizens’ lives better. This is where civic innovation comes into play and that is where citizens can take a lead and help the government.
Even before she officially started working on Honolulu Answers at CfA, Sheba realized that she would have to take her newfound skills to Pakistan where governance is a mess and there is a tremendous need for civic hacking. That is when the idea for CfP was conceived!
Humble Beginnings, Pakistan’s First Civic Hackathon
Sheba had always felt the desire and responsibility to pay back to the country of her roots and origins, Pakistan. She shared her intentions of bringing civic innovation to Pakistan with CfA’s founder Jennifer Pahlka, who supported and encouraged her.
Sheba came back to Pakistan, her determination strong, her vision big but her resources limited. The challenges she was about to face were as big as her vision. Sheba got connected with Sabeen Mahmud, one of Pakistan’s most prominent social and human rights activists and founder of T2F, and Jehan Ara, the President of the Pakistan Software Houses Association for IT (P@SHA) who became the co-organizers and enablers of Pakistan’s first ever Civic Hackathon held in Karachi in 2013.
This hackathon was a humble beginning with limited resources, no prizes for the winners, one last minute sponsor (Pring) and scheduled only on a ten days notice. Within the next six days one hundred and eleven attendees had already applied to participate. There were doctors, engineers, government employees, students, professionals, people who were ready to contribute, ready to mentor others and ready to be the competition judges, with nothing offered in return. The first civic hackathon was a phenomenal success. It validated that citizens of Pakistan wanted to use their skills to innovate and improve public services. This laid the foundation for Code for Pakistan.
The Giant Leap, Code for Pakistan
In 2013, Sheba founded Code for Pakistan (CfP) and brought Pakistan onboard to join the league of countries currently part of Code for All’s global movement to bring change through civic innovation and transforming civic life by increasing civic engagement, encouraging the opening of government data, and supporting innovation in the public domain.
Since its inception, CfP has successfully conducted multiple Civic Hackathons within 4 major cities of Pakistan, launched a Fellowship Program in partnership with KPK’s provincial government and the World Bank, established Civic Innovation Labs in Lahore and Islamabad, deployed multiple open source apps, and led to civic startups. One such example of CfP’s success is the launch of Savaree, which is Pakistan’s first carpool mobile phone service aiming to provide drivers and ride-seekers the opportunity to coordinate, share and explore routes to bring potential carpoolers. The idea for Savaree was pitched at the CfP’s Lahore Civic Hackathon. It won the audience's favourite award and later turned into a full blown startup.
The most important initiative of CfP is the launch of its six month Fellowship Program, an idea similar to Code for America’s fellowship. It is currently sponsored by CfP, the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa IT Board, and the World Bank and through this program a team of 20 talented fellows is selected to innovate in public services and to build apps through collaboration. These fellows offer diverse backgrounds and expertise in various disciplines, including research, application design, community organization, and software development. The apps built by this team help solve problems in a variety of domains, such as healthcare, crime, disaster management, citizen engagement, transportation, education, and many more. These CfP fellows are bringing a revolutionary change to the way civic institutions embrace and adopt technology and innovation, and redefining the role of citizens in initiating this change. If you follow CfP’s Facebook page, it shares stories of its 2015 fellows, who are currently working on multiple projects under the KP Civic Innovation Fellowship Program. For example, Farrukh Askari and Madiha Zahoor are two CfP fellows who are currently working on a Residential Management System, a project of KPK government's Establishment Department. Another CfP fellow, Allauddin Khan is leading a project developing an automated file processing system for the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa IT Board.
Sheba has built a team of volunteers who are taking CfP to the next level. She has successfully engaged the professional networks like OPEN Islamabad to facilitate the technological innovation process by working in collaboration with CfP. However, her biggest achievement is to bring the two most challenging stakeholders of a civic innovation onboard, the government and its citizens. CfP has brought them together to be part of the change, through collaboration, address civic needs and enhance civic life. CfP’s current goal is to work with the Pakistani government to have an open data policy, which will help creating large opportunities for innovation and social impact.
These are revolutionary steps towards bringing a change within governments through technology, and these are laying the foundation on which our future civic and technological innovations will stand high, thus making Sheba’s dream of a better Pakistan and a better world, a reality.
Concluding Thoughts
It is hard to capture Sheba’s achievements and contribution towards revolutionizing the way technology, civic innovation and governments are working today and will work tomorrow in Pakistan, in a single blog post. However, if you have read this far, you probably got an idea that through her work, Sheba has created ripples large enough to bring a revolutionary change within Pakistan’s civic life and how it will use technology in future.
When I asked Sheba about some of the biggest challenges she faced, she counted a few. From holding the first civic hackathon to founding CfP, there were times when she felt completely alone and had no one else but herself to guide and make all the big decisions and take all the big steps. She was supported by her family and many others who supported her vision, however taking the very first step alone was not easy. If given a choice to go back in time, she would like to change this one thing and would like to add more people who would give her expert advice and support at every crucial step of her journey. The second biggest challenge was to understand and work with different provincial governments in Pakistan, as every province has a completely different culture. She had to quickly learn and adapt to their ways of working to get her message across the table. Lastly, while the love and support of her family gave her tremendous strength to pursue her dreams, their concerns about Sheba’s safety while visiting terror stricken areas like Peshawar, also added one more to the list of challenges.
Sheba’s journey from holding the first ever civic hackathon in Pakistan to the launch of CfP, she has shown extraordinary conviction, resilience, hard work, and a strong faith that this whole thing will just work - and yes, it did work!
Her passion to make Pakistan a better place to live is not just limited to herself, she is inspiring many to join her and building a brigade of technology innovators and community developers which will continue to add value to the society beyond our times.
The impact of her work is so strong and her personality so convincing and inspiring, that while you are reading these lines, I have already joined CfP as a volunteer.
Pakistani Women of Inspiration is a series of blog posts initiated by OPEN Islamabad to recognize and celebrate contributions and achievements of Pakistani women professionals and entrepreneurs, across the globe. By sharing these stimulating stories we are not only intending to showcase their work and accomplishments, but also hoping that others can get inspired and learn from them.
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