Celebrating Shell Tameer’s Female Entrepreneurs on International Women’s Day 2021

Empowering Women is a key area of focus at Shell Tameer, Shell Pakistan’s LiveWIRE programme. In line with Shell’s commitment to closing the gender gap, Shell Tameer strives to create an entrepreneurial ecosystem that fosters growth, sustainability and resilience for women entrepreneurs.

This International Women’s Day, Shell Tameer proudly celebrated its female entrepreneurs by developing a video to highlight three rising stars within their cohort:

Ramla Kaleem – CEO, Aqua Agro

Ramla is a young engineer providing Internet of Things (IoT)-based smart farming solutions that enable farmers to monitor their crops with the help of sensors (light, humidity, temperature, soil moisture). This automation of the agri-system results in increased profitability and resource optimisation, reducing input costs for farmers (water, seeds, pesticides, etc.): https://aquaagro.smartcube.pk/

Madiha Hassan – Founder, Pankh

Madiha’s company Pankh (meaning “a pair of wings” in Urdu) offers women subsidised motorcycle- and bike-riding training sessions to improve their mobility and address the challenges faced by women in urban spaces: https://dcomm.pk/pankh/about.php

Mehwish – Founder, Mahi Stitching Centre

Mehwish is a young single mother. She runs a small boutique, empowering women in her community through sewing and stitching trainings.

The 2021 video is simply the latest instalment in Shell Tameer’s series of annual events to celebrate women business leaders. For example, in 2019, Shell Tameer saw International Women’s Day as the occasion to host mentoring circles for 14 alumni with leadership roles in start-ups. The day-long activity included discussions on the role of women in leadership, human resource management and sustainable business planning. Furthermore, the entrepreneurs were able to take the opportunity to learn from each other and discuss the challenges they faced while operating businesses during periods of economic uncertainty.

The mentorship circles also proved to be a networking opportunity for the entrepreneurs, who had been trained on basic business management through Shell Tameer’s “Build the Future” workshops. Since 2015, the “Build the Future” programme has trained over 300 Pakistani youth and offered 2.5 million PKR in business support grants, resulting in the creation of over 90 start-ups (including 17 women-led businesses).

Take a minute to watch this short video of these inspiring women who choose to challenge social and economic barriers and seek to make change in their local communities!