Maira Siddiqui’s background
Maira Siddiqui is the CEO & co-founder of an Ed-Tech named Chiragh Education Technologies and also an Entrepreneurship lecturer at KSBL. She is a third-generation educator, hailing from a family that not only wrote the first IT policy of Pakistan but also established the Karachi Institute of Information Technology (Kiit) and wrote the Kashif Urdu Qaida. Maira has over 15 years of experience working with educational non-profit organizations such as The Citizens Foundation and Maidan. In addition to understanding the education sector, she has also worked in the marketing teams of corporations such as Byco Petroleum and Unilever. Maira has raised approximately PKR 1CR through several international and local business competitions for Chiragh, such as Social Enterprise Academy 23 Scotland, ICESCO’22 in Morocco, Standard Chartered Bank’s Women in Tech 23, Prime Minister’s National Innovation Award 23 by the Government of Pakistan, IBA Invent 23, and IoBM’s Grant Challenge 22. Maira pursued her Undergrad in Economics & Entrepreneurship from Indiana University and SMU in Dallas, followed by a Diploma in Entrepreneurship from IBA and an MBA from KSBL in which she secured a silver medal.
Early Failures leading to Chiragh
Growing up, Maira learned how to draw before she could write, by scribbling on the floor, any piece of furniture Maira could find and of-course, every child’s personal favorite “𝒉𝒐𝒎𝒆 𝒘𝒂𝒍𝒍𝒔”. The better her art got, the worse her ability to learn got. By age 7 Maira could barely read English let alone Urdu and throughout school, her only accolades were in art. Maira was growing up in an era where Good grades = Intelligence. IQ was the only acceptable measure of intelligence while there was no understanding of EQ, PQ or DQ. Then along with her family she moved from Karachi to Islamabad where she was unable to complete her school entrance test therefore was held back a year, repeating 3rd grade. This only added to her insecurity regarding her English and overall intelligence as a child, but the moment her pencil would touch the low quality cartridge paper, she’d enter into this alternative dimension, free of negative self-talk, a trance of sort, when she’d finally come out of that trance, day would have turned into night and night would have turned into day. From fine art Maira slowly started experimenting with satirical caricatures (cartoons of real people), capturing their likeness as well as her thoughts towards them. With hesitance Maira started testing her original canvas “𝒉𝒐𝒎𝒆 𝒘𝒂𝒍𝒍𝒔”, turns out this time her art actually made the walls look better rather than worse so her parents let her have at them and after a while Maira was painting full scale murals. Maira was still a terrible student but there was something Maira was uniquely good at, ART.
As Maira transitioned from primary to secondary school her English started getting better but Urdu and art started taking a back seat in her life. With a much better command over English and a “D” grade after a retake in A Level math, Maira went off to the U.S to pursue the dry but more respectable degree of “Business Administration” that later became an economics degree, which is technically a liberal “art”. During her time studying the the U.S she met Chinese and Saudi students who didn’t speak any English when they got there but after just a 3 month foundation course in English they were able to complete their entire degrees in English which got Maira thinking that if as an educated adult you could learn English in a matter of 3 months then “why did Pakistan focus on English education as opposed to teaching children basics in their mother tongue”, the languages that they do speak rather than English, a language that’s a remnant of Pakistan’s colonial past.
With the misplaced focus of Pakistan’s language policy biting at her, she came back to Pakistan to start her career at the Citizens Foundation, where she saw math being taught in Urdu. After her short tenure at TCF she switched to the corporate world where misplaced focus on English was highlighted even further. Being a child who always coloured outside the lines Maira soon resigned from her corporate job and decided to in-skill herself with an MBA from KSBL to do something about Pakistan’s misplaced focus on English. As Covid-19 hit her MBA was on hiatus for 3 months. During which she decided to take her love of cartoons and art one step further as she learned how to animate through online resources and soon her drawings came to life.
After two intensive years and a silver medal her MBA concluded. Shortly after which she started toying with an idea that combined her 3 passions of art, cartoons and decolonized Pakistani education. On the eve of 2nd October 2021, while Maira enjoyed a steak dinner with her friends, the misplaced focus of Pakistan’s language policy found its way into conversation, at the right place at the right time as her friend Khushal Piracha assured her that he would guide her into initiating it. From advisor Khushal transitioned into Co-founder and the duo worked towards enrolling their idea into an incubation center. Maira was still unsure about whether she wanted to go full-time on Chiragh so she was interviewing for jobs, but she made a deal with herself that if Chiragh got accepted into an incubation center she would solely focus on it even if an hour later she got a final offer call from one of the jobs she was interviewing for. Chiragh got into NIC Karachi and then two days later Maira got an impressive offer from a corporation she had applied to. With great difficulty Maira said no to the offer, dedicating herself to Chiragh full-time, she had to make it work now at any cost because she had pulled the corporate safety net from under her feet.
First step to her success
So she diverted her attention back to the misplaced focus of Pakistan’s language policy. Wondering that if TCF could teach math in Urdu then why wasn’t it done at large in Pakistan? What about private schools, was their focus on English justifiable or was it just the remnants of the post colonial complex? She started interviewing parents of children who went to private schools. Turns out that parents understood the importance of teaching their children Pakistan’s national language Urdu but couldn’t find Urdu resources as engaging as “Cocomelon” or “Baby Shark”, their child would refuse to learn Urdu from a book after watching cartoons and playing games in English. That’s when it clicked Maira that fun Urdu resources needed to be created for children. So she came up with a play based Urdu learning & tarbiyat approach, part digital, part physical. Using a child’s surroundings to teach them Urdu characters & phonics for nursery to grade 5, in bite-sized educational episodes modeled after Dora the explorer’s question format arch.
The digital products included two YouTube channels:
- The first was Chiragh Kids TV which has Dora the Explorer-style edutainment episodes covering the breadth of primary schooling in Urdu initially with them aim to expand to Sindhi and other regional languages.
- The second was Chiragh Urdu Rhymes & Stories which recreates Old Urdu rhymes along with some original Urdu rhymes and moral stories for children.
Maira made Chiragh’s first animated video herself while sitting on her room’s couch while learning animation from a YouTube channel called TipTut. It was an animated video of Urdu Haroof Alif and Alif Madaa. The main character, Bubbly looked more like Rick from Rick and Morty than a child friendly character. She recorded the voiceovers on her phone in a closet, and It took her a month to make just 6 minutes of animation.
How to learn Urdu easy Urdu Alphabets and words | Alif-Alif mad aa || اردو حروف تہجی | ا-آ
The physical portfolio included:
Urdu haroof flashcards which had a QR code leading to the Dora style YouTube video of each haroof
Urdu Counting flashcard kit recognize, count, write and recall urdu ginti from 1-20 in a playful way by coloring and drawing on the cards with an erasable marker.
Tarbiyat Card games for Emotional intelligence, morality, civic leadership, decision making & Pakistani knowledge. Build for Teach the World Pakistan
Maira Siddiqui’s Success
It wasn’t until their 6th month that Chiragh won her first grant, IoBM’s grant challenge 22, followed by a larger grant of $10,000 by ICESCO, Morocco in their 11th month. This grant was pivotal as the initial capital infusion which came out of Maira and Khushal’s pocket was running out so unless they won a grant, they would have to shut down. After their ICESCO win the duo had created a system to win grants which led them to raise money from Scotland, Standard Chartered Bank Pakistan, IBA and the government of Pakistan. Here’s a synthesized version of their system.
Step 1: Research
Maira dedicated her Co-founder Khushal to the funding aspect. He would find all startup enablers in and out of Pakistan and maintain a list of the grants/pitch competitions they have throughout the year. Most of these enablers have the same competitions and grants every year. These enablers include incubation centers such as NICS, as well as government organizations such as HEC. Internationally look at USAID, ICESCO, Social Enterprise academy and just in general countries looking to invest in Pakistan. Follow these enablers on all their social mediums. Maintain a google sheet or whichever format is best suited for you and follow their Linkedin + Insta, which is where they post about grant openings.
Step 2: Apply
First stage of every grant is an application which generally does not require a pitch deck but rather an essence of what you’re making, whom it’s for, how you’re gonna sell it and why people would buy from you. Also they want to see how far you are willing to go. This part was also done by Khushal, the more applications he filled the better we got at filling them and he would save the answers of each application to repurpose them for the next application, working smart.
Step 3: Proposal/Pitch Deck
For government-related grants you need a lengthy proposal but for pitch competitions, if you progress to the second stage then you have to submit a pitch deck. Which is probably a startup’s most valuable asset. The standard pitch deck is called a problem solution pitch deck and is 10-12 slides, you can find templates on websites such as Founder’s institute, Y-combinator or slide bean. Keep your pitch deck clean, focus on telling a story through infographics from flaticon.com and minimize text. Once we’d reach the pitch deck stage, that’s when my leg of the application would start. Khushal would then submit the deck.
Step 4: Training
If you make it through the 2nd stage then you’re most likely going to go through startup training for a week. This training will include workshops on topics such as business model, marketing, market sizing and so on. These training sessions are mandatory and often participants that don’t attend them get disqualified. The expectation is to incorporate your learnings from these training into your pitch. Initially the duo would delegate this part to one of their employees as well but their win at SCB women in Tech made Maira realize that if she was pitching then she should be taking these trainings as it gives her a chance to get her deck tweaked by the trainers according to the winning criteria of the competition.
Step 5: Pitching
This is the last stage of any grant or pitch competition, if you’ve made it this far, give yourself a pat on the back and get to practicing your post training pitch in under 5 minutes. There are instances where competitions require 3 minutes or 8 minute pitches. Use your deck to help you through this, it should tell a story that softens the judges and draws them in. After the pitch the judging panel asks questions and answers, mostly related to your business model, why you’re unique and your scalability. If you don’t know anything, don’t lie, judges hate that, instead compliment the judges for directing your attention towards that area and assure them that you’re hungry to find its answer.
Tips:
- Don’t let a NO dishearten you, we must have filled over a 100 applications in total to win 6 grants in total and Chiragh didn’t win a big grant until their 11th month.
- Division of labor and delegation, one person can not go through the entire process on their own, the process for any grant/competition is 3-6 months on average.
- Keep updating your pitch deck, you never know when you’ll get a call to pitch.
- If you’ve lost a pitch/grant, drop that ego and ask the judges where you went wrong, that feedback will increase your chances of winning the next grant/competition and might even initiate a much needed pivot for your startup.
- Help others out, help other participants prepare, encourage them, clap for them after their pitch, often your future customers, collaborators are attending these competitions, network, connect, be human.
This doesn’t have to be your system, it’s just the system that works for Chiragh, but the main takeaway is that you need to have a system and one person can’t do everything yourself.
What’s next for Maira and Chiragh
In 2024, Chiragh now stands at the precipice of a new year, eagerly meeting school foundations, private schools and Edtech, exploring how collaboration can help them get closer to their dream of a Parha Likha Pakistan through decolonized education. Stay tuned on Stories Lap for more inspirational stories.
