A SAFER RIDE

Young tech entrepreneur Hira Batool Rizvi’s carpooling app offers women commuters in Pakistan a safe and efficient way to get to college or work

This November, when Vodafone Institute’s Berlin-based F-Lane accelerator programme for businesses using technology to empower women was in progress, an unlikely participant was part of the online conference: a newborn baby.

But little Aaleen had been part of her mother Hira Batool Rizvi’s entrepreneurial venture even before birth as the 30-year-old founder of She’Kab – Pakistan’s first monthly carpooling app for women – managed operations remotely from Dubai during the pandemic. “The baby was supposed to be born after I completed the virtual accelerator programme, but she was three weeks early,” smiles Hira.

Like her daughter, Hira too is a woman in a hurry. She was 26 when she launched She’Kab to help fill the gap for safe public transport for urban Pakistani women. “Car ownership rates are dismal for women, and the state of public transport is terrible. Public vans [small buses] in cities have only one seat in the front next to the driver for women; the rest of the van is reserved for men. The assumption is that their place is at home. So women who don’t have their own cars end up spending four times as much as men on commuting safely for education or work,” says Hira.

According to a 2017 report, 90 percent women face harassment on public transport and 82 percent at bus stops in Pakistan. Most of these women commuters do not report them due to fears that their complaints will not be acted on by the authorities, or that their families may curtail their independence if they knew the truth. “Many women drop out of educational institutions or the workforce due to this systemic lapse,” says Hira.