The Start-Up

The entrepreneurs fixing Pakistan’s problems one start-up at a time

Making healthcare accessible for women and using video games to help children with special needs are among the new apps transforming the world’s fifth most populous country. Zlata Rodionova and Julia Hanne report

Thursday 26 December 2019 00:48 GMT
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A student holds up a robot she programmed during a LearnOBots workshop
A student holds up a robot she programmed during a LearnOBots workshop

With his yellow backpack and Pakistani school uniform, Namir looks like a typical 11-year-old. He’s charming, lively and has a passion for video games. But the little boy also suffers from a brain injury and physical disability, as a result of being given the wrong injection to treat his meningitis as a child.

Disability remains heavily stigmatised in Pakistan, where 96 per cent of children with special needs are out of school and there is only one therapist for every 30,000 students. Rarely brought out into the public by their families, these youngsters often live in isolation, which worsens their condition.

Dissatisfied with the complete lack of available treatment options, Muhammad Usman, whose elder brother suffers from Down’s syndrome, founded WonderTree – a start-up which introduces computer games to children with learning disabilities – in 2015. “One day, I saw my brother playing games on my console and he was really good at it. So I thought, why not do something different?”

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