Silicon Valley Helping Build Pakistan's Human Capital

[Riaz Haq]

Last week I attended a Silicon Valley fundraiser by iCodeGuru, a Pakistani-American group focusing on arranging training and guiding young men and women from underprivileged backgrounds to get full scholarships for advanced STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) degrees at universities in America. The well-attended event held at Chandni restaurant raised over $180,000. It featured iCodeGruru alumni who shared their success stories. 

iCodeGuru Alumna Afsheen Ghuman Speaking at Silicon Valley Fundraiser.

The story of Afsheen Ghuman from Gujranwala shows how a poor girl from a small town can succeed in defying the odds with a little help from iCodeGuru team headed by Dr. Zafar Shahid. She was able to take advantage of the online platform remotely from her home.  She is now studying at an American university with a fully funded scholarship. iCodeGuru uses its online platform to offer advice, training and financial assistance to get advanced technical education, scholarships and initial funding for successful candidates to come to the United States. Currently, there are 22,000 students signed up for help via the iCodeGuru platform. 

There are several similar efforts underway by Silicon Valley Pakistani-Americans to help build Pakistan's human capital in technology. Ashar Aziz Foundation, created and funded by Pakistani-American technology entrepreneur Ashar Aziz, has sponsored Advanced AI Bootcamps at the National University of Science and Technology (NUST) in Islamabad.  The bootcamp series not only provides theoretical knowledge but also emphasizes practical, project-based learning, according to NUST. 

The first AI bootcamp, which focused on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), was successfully completed at NUST in November 2023. The second bootcamp provided participants with in-depth knowledge and hands-on experience in the development and application of LLMs (Large Language Models). Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences & Technology (GIKI) also joined this initiative in 2024, conducting its own DNN-focused bootcamp. Participants have the opportunity to work with advanced technologies, including access to a 10xH100 NVIDIA GPU AI supercomputer, ensuring they are well-prepared to tackle real-world challenges in AI. As part of its ongoing efforts, NUST plans to partner with additional universities across Pakistan to further scale this initiative, ensuring that more students have access to high-quality AI training, according to NUST. 

Smaller towns in Pakistan are also setting up AI programs with the help of Pakistani-Americans. For example, Stanford educated AI expert Shoaib Lari and Silicon Valley based technology executive Jalil Shaikh have helped Islamia University Bahawalpur start an AI program. Jalil Shaikh is now working with US-based companies to place the first group of graduates from this program. 

STEM education underlies Artificial Intelligence. Pakistan stands 4th in the world with 642,562 students enrolled in STEM courses– behind Nigeria (675,371), the US (4,639,771) and India (6,000,967), according to Coursera's Global Skills Report 2023. My own estimate based on HEC data is that STEM enrollment in Pakistan exceeds one million. 

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[Riaz Haq]

Profit
@Profitpk
About 8.6% of Pakistanis over the age of 25 have a bachelor's degree or higher. It is a growing number, with college graduates increasing by three times the population growth rate. What does this mean for Pakistan, especially in the age of AI? {THREAD}

https://x.com/Profitpk/status/1895013898937397564

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The state of higher education in Pakistan
How educated is the Pakistani workforce, and what is it prepared for, especially in the age of AI?

February 24, 2025
Farooq Tirmizi
By Farooq Tirmizi

https://profit.pakistantoday.com.pk/2025/02/24/the-state-of-higher-...

The college-educated Pakistani is not yet the majority, but is rapidly becoming part of the norm.

More than half a million Pakistanis graduate from a college or university every year with at least a two-year college degree. A little more than 11% of 30-year-olds in Pakistan have at least a two-year college degree and, judging by the fact that the number of graduates is growing at three times the population growth rate, that number will likely keep on rising for every subsequent generation of 30-year-olds in the country.

So what do those statistics mean? It is by now cliché to assume that the quality of higher education in Pakistan is not good (partly true) and that while the country has a lot of raw talent, the country is not prepared for the rapid advancement of technology that will necessitate a much better trained workforce than the one we have now.


There is no denying the fact that education – both in terms of quality and quantity – is lacking in Pakistan. It is the contention of this publication, expressed through previous analytical writings, however, that the situation can be described as not ideal, but far from hopeless.

While in previous articles we have covered basic literacy and numeracy, in this piece will cover higher education, placing it in both historical context relative to where it has been in Pakistan’s own past, as well as the global context: where Pakistan stands relative to peer economies and geographic neighbours.

We will then examine a question often left unasked: exactly how well-educated does the median Pakistani need to be, given where the country is in its economic evolution? And how has the answer to that question changed with the advent of the recent, more visible, rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI)?

[Riaz Haq]

Education in Pakistan: Not good, but maybe good enough - Profit by Pakistan Today

https://profit.pakistantoday.com.pk/2024/08/05/education-in-pakista...


Not waiting for government favours

While part of this progress is certainly driven by improvements to the government’s own infrastructure, measured purely by proportion of the increase in student enrollment, the private sector has contributed just under 75% of the total growth in enrollment between 2009 and 2022, according to enrollment estimates published in the Pakistan Education Statistics reports published by the Pakistan Institute of Education. The public sector accounts for the remaining 25%.

In other words, Pakistanis are not waiting around for the government to fix the schools (even though the government is making some progress on that front). They are simply going ahead and paying for private schools themselves as soon as they have the ability to pay.

This phenomenon helps explain why the fastest progress in terms of increasing literacy happened in the decade after Pakistan’s dependency ratios – the ratio of prime working age adults to the number of children under the age of 15 and retirees over the age of 65 – peaked.

The dependency ratio peaked in 1995, and that year also represented the an inflection point in literacy improvements: for every year after that, the 10-year progress towards improving literacy kept on rising at a rising pace (the second differential was positive) for the next decade.


What does that mean? It means that once families started to find that they had a bit more spare cash to spend (with dependency ratios declining after 1995), they started investing that spare cash into private school fees for their children, especially in urban areas, and especially in the urban areas they did so at nearly identical rates for their sons and daughters.

Having spent the lead up to 1995 being increasingly cash strapped, the first thing that Pakistani families did when the pressure on their cash flows eased a bit was to invest in the future economic productivity of their households by educating their children. And in perhaps a scathing indictment of how bad the public schools were, they did so through private schools even when public schools were available in their areas.