Haroon Yasin, Education Champion

Digitising Pakistan's national curriculum to help out-of-school students continue their education at home

The Issue

The issue

Pakistan currently has the second highest number of out-of-school children in the world — and most are girls. In many communities, there aren’t enough schools for girls to attend or high tuition fees prevent the most marginalised girls from attending.

Haroon’s approach

Digital Learning

Haroon is a teacher and educational entrepreneur in Pakistan — but it took dropping out of college for him to discover his passion for education. After abandoning his engineering degree, Haroon spent time in a slum village near his home in Pakistan and realised the children there didn’t have a safe space to play. At the age of 18, he opened up a school to help children in the community learn.

In 2015, Haroon founded the Orenda Project to provide high quality, engaging education to every child. Orenda digitised Pakistan’s national curriculum and developed Taleemabad, a mobile and web application that helps out-of-school children resume their studies. With his Malala Fund grant, Haroon expanded the Taleemabad curriculum to include secondary education. He trains teachers, community groups and district officials to use Taleemabad and reach even more out-of-school girls.

Haroon’s impact

In May 2020, Taleemabad reached 238,520 downloads. Taleemabad recently signed an agreement with the federal Ministry of Education in Pakistan to broadcast their content on national television as part of the national government’s teleschool programme. Haroon and his team are currently working to add more lessons to the app, increase digital advertising and repurpose the app’s cartoon characters for an educational children’s show to broadcast twice a day on Pakistani television.

To help girls in Pakistan continue learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, Haroon expanded his work with Taleemabad to develop additional content, increase awareness and offer more customer service support. Downloads for Taleemabad increased 600% in March 2020 and users spent 15,380 hours on the app from June 13-20.