Startup Al-Falah’s initiative to ’empower women from childhood’

Employee turnover has a negative impact on the organizational culture, therefore it is important for employers to understand “What makes an employee leave the organization?”

It may be very costly because the employer has spent the administrative cost of recruitment, orientation, training and development of new employee and even the cost of that time span in which there is a vacancy.

In Pakistan, low tier management is provided with health benefits, life insurance as well as OPD benefits in some organizations, monetary benefits like bonuses and commissions, still the employees of low tier management are compelled to leave the job whenever they have an opportunity to find new job with slightly better benefit structure, especially when benefits provided by the current workplace doesn’t match his family requirements.

Looking at the major challenges faced by the low tier management, that includes sales representative, order booker, merchandiser, supervisor, supplier, daily sales representatives etc., the start-up Al-Falah, incubated at NIC Karachi has come up with an innovative solution towards solving the problem.  “We convert the schools of these children to quality standard education school chains and encourage the employer to bear a certain percentage of fee structure and the remaining to be contributed by the employee,” says Saad Tanveer, Founder of Al-Falah.

The employees of low tier management have an average of three children per household but do not have an income set to support the education of all the children. As a result, only one child goes to school and the other two are forced to remain uneducated. Imagine the impact it would create if all the children of employees are able to acquire education. It would show that employers are invested in the well-being and upgrading lifestyle of their employees, resulting in increased productivity and decreased turnover as the happy employees are more likely to stay at a company for a longer period of time.

Moreover, the solution is manoeuvred to fulfil CSR initiatives in terms of providing education to the less deserved. Like many other countries, girls’ education is one of the most exhaustive challenges in Pakistan. The right to education is denied to over 30 million children from whom 70% are girls who never entered a classroom. The barriers that these girls face are financial limitations, social exclusion, cultural barriers, taboos, prioritization of boys’ rather than girls’ education and poor infrastructure. As a result, the girls end up in child labour or early marriages.

Al-Falah came through with an effective solution by introducing Tele-Education into the country based on girls education, , i.e. providing them with a platform for E-learning from the comfort of their home, cutting a range of other indirect costs such as textbooks, school uniforms and transport. Al-Falah tends to provide equal access to quality standard primary education to girls, creating a child-friendly education system, increasing teachers training and involving more women in teaching, developing alternative online teaching methods and providing better access to education in both urban and rural areas of Pakistan.

“We must make a joint effort towards supporting girls’ education and realize the economic benefits of investing in girls’ education as every girl forced to remain uneducated is a girl we have failed”, says Marium Khan, Co-Founder of Al-Falah.

The corporates can play a vital part and as a result, it can prove out to be a good branding initiative to scale the reach of the brand.