Fiza Farhan: Putting Women in the Driver’s Seat

Fiza Farhan – From social entrepreneurship and rural microfinance to the global corridors of the United Nations, Fiza Farhan’s two-decade journey has been defined by one enduring ambition: turning women’s potential into economic power.

For Fiza Farhan, development has never been an abstract conversation confined to policy rooms or international conferences. Her understanding of empowerment was shaped first by experience on the ground—by travelling to villages, meeting women, seeing their skills and limitations firsthand, and discovering why well-intentioned development initiatives often fail to produce lasting change.

Over the past two decades, that experience has taken her from Pakistan’s rural communities to the highest levels of global policymaking. Along the way, she has worked as a social entrepreneur, development practitioner, government adviser and international policymaker, while building partnerships between governments, businesses, development institutions and communities.

Her central belief has remained remarkably consistent: sustainable development requires more than giving people opportunities; it requires building an ecosystem in which those opportunities can become economically viable.

Fiza Farhan – A Navy childhood

Farhan grew up in a Navy family, spending much of her childhood in a highly mobile environment. Her father served in the Navy, and her education took her from Islamabad to England and wherever her family’s postings led them.

She later graduated from LUMS and earned a master’s degree from Warwick Business School.

But her professional journey was not mapped out around a single destination. As she describes it, one opportunity led naturally to another, driven by an early desire to do work that could benefit people.

That ambition found its first major expression in social entrepreneurship.

Farhan began her career as CEO of Buksh Foundation and Buksh Energy, two social enterprises she launched with the Haji Karim Buksh family. Buksh Energy became Pakistan’s first renewable energy company, exposing her to the challenges of introducing new business models in an emerging market.

At the same time, Buksh Foundation focused on women in rural communities through microfinance, education, empowerment and youth initiatives.

It was an experience that would fundamentally shape her approach to development.

Rather than seeing rural women simply as beneficiaries of development programmes, Farhan began viewing them as potential entrepreneurs, producers and economic actors whose skills could generate value—if they were connected to the right markets, finance and knowledge.

Fiza Farhan – From village realities to the global stage

In 2016, Farhan’s career took a dramatic turn when the UN Secretary-General appointed her as an adviser and member of the High-Level Panel on Women’s Economic Empowerment.

The appointment placed her in a global policy environment involving senior leadership from institutions including the IMF, World Bank, UN Women and ILO.

For Farhan, it was an opportunity not only to contribute to the international conversation on women’s economic empowerment, but also to represent Pakistan and Pakistani women on a global platform.

Yet the experience did not distance her from the realities she had encountered in rural Pakistan. Instead, it reinforced one of the defining lessons of her career: global policies only become meaningful when they work for the people whose lives they are intended to change.

As she puts it, it is easy to sit in an office in New York and debate major policy questions. The harder—and more important—task is to visit the villages where those policies ultimately have to work.

Her first decade as a practitioner had given her that perspective.

Bringing gender into government policy

Farhan subsequently served as Chairperson of the Chief Minister Punjab’s Women’s Empowerment Task Force during Shehbaz Sharif’s tenure as Chief Minister.

For two years, she worked on incorporating a gender perspective across government policies, projects, partnerships and budgets.

The experience strengthened her conviction that women’s empowerment cannot be treated as a standalone programme.

Instead, gender has to be considered across the entire policy ecosystem—from budgets and infrastructure to education, employment and economic opportunity.

By this stage, Farhan had experienced development from multiple perspectives: as a practitioner working directly with communities, as a global policymaker and as someone working inside government.

She concluded that none of these sectors could solve the problem alone.

In 2016, she launched her own development advisory firm, where she continues to work across multiple areas, including women’s empowerment, climate change, youth, sustainability, development and education.

Her role today is often less about working within one institution and more about connecting institutions.

She advises organisations including UNICEF and the UN and serves as convener of Champions of Change, an alliance of private-sector CEOs.

Her objective is to bring different sectors together around shared development challenges.

For Farhan, this collaboration is not simply desirable—it is essential.

Governments have reach. The private sector has expertise and resources. Development institutions have knowledge. Communities understand their own realities. Sustainable solutions emerge when these strengths are connected.

Fiza Farhan – Why skills alone are not enough?

One of the clearest examples of Farhan’s approach can be found in her thinking about women in Azad Kashmir.

Across the region, many women work from home in handicrafts, embroidery, furniture-making and other cottage industries. Tourism has created opportunities for some of these products, but Farhan believes the potential goes much further.

The problem, she argues, is often not a lack of skills.

It is the absence of a connection between skills and markets.

A woman may know how to crochet, for example, but that does not necessarily mean she knows how to transform that skill into a product that an urban consumer in Karachi—or an international customer—would want to purchase.

That gap between production and demand is where Farhan sees an enormous opportunity.

Her proposed model begins by identifying the strongest existing skills among women, refining those skills through targeted training and teaching women how to turn their abilities into commercially viable products.

But product development is only the beginning.

Women also need business training, financial literacy and digital literacy. They need access to payment systems and finance. And, eventually, they need a route into larger markets through e-commerce.

In other words, empowerment is not simply about teaching a woman to make something.

It is about helping her turn that skill into a sustainable business.

From informal work to international markets

Farhan has already tested this model elsewhere in Pakistan.

Through the Champions of Change coalition, a project was developed in South Punjab and South Sindh to connect women working in cottage industries with the infrastructure required to turn informal production into market-oriented businesses.

The Pakistan Microfinance Investment Company identified talented women working from home.

Textile companies including Chatani Industries, Liberty Mills and MG Apparel became design-training partners, helping women transform their existing skills into products.

HBL and Mobilink Microfinance provided financial access and microfinance loans.

JazzCash contributed digital financial literacy and payment access.

TCS worked as the logistics partner, while Daraz became the e-commerce partner. Through Daraz Academy, women entrepreneurs were taught how to take their products online, sell them and build their digital presence.

At least 1,500 women have gone through the process, under an initiative Farhan describes as “Informal to International,” which she calls Pakistan’s first digital marketplace for women entrepreneurs.

The model captures much of what has come to define her approach: no single institution is expected to solve every problem.

Instead, each partner contributes a piece of the ecosystem.

Fiza Farhan – What economic empowerment means?

For Farhan, financial literacy is inseparable from women’s economic empowerment.

Simply earning money does not necessarily mean a woman is economically independent.

A woman may work in agriculture or a cottage industry, generate income and still have little control over how that income is used.

This distinction is particularly important in rural communities.

Farhan points to the example of women working in agriculture who contribute significant labour but may not personally control the wages generated through that labour.

For her, genuine economic empowerment means having both access to financial resources and the freedom to make decisions about them.

That is why digital and financial literacy are increasingly central to the projects she supports.

Working with partners such as Mobilink Bank, HBL Microfinance Bank and Pakistan Microfinance Investment Company, she sees financial capability as a foundation for entrepreneurship and digital commerce.

Without understanding money, digital payments, savings, credit and business finance, women cannot fully participate in today’s economy.

The mobility barrier

Yet economic empowerment cannot be separated from the social realities women face.

For women in rural areas, Farhan identifies mobility and safety as major obstacles.

While workplaces and private-sector organisations have increasingly developed policies around issues such as sexual harassment, psychological safety and inclusion, women living in conservative rural environments may face a more basic restriction: they may not be permitted to leave their homes because of concerns about safety.

This creates a different kind of development challenge.

Creating opportunities is not enough if women cannot safely access them.

Farhan therefore advocates an ecosystem that simultaneously improves women’s mobility and safety while creating opportunities that can be accessed from home.

E-commerce and cottage industries, for example, can allow women to participate in the economy without waiting for every social barrier to disappear.

The broader principle is pragmatic: change the ecosystem where possible, but also identify and use the opportunities that already exist.

The women must choose

Farhan’s own career has also become an argument against the idea that professional success and family life are mutually exclusive for women.

When she began her career, she says, she encountered a prevailing belief in the microfinance sector that only unmarried or divorced women could achieve professional success.

People warned her that marriage would change everything.

She married—and found a supportive life partner whom she describes as the “wind beneath my wings.”

Then came another prediction: having children would make her professional life impossible.

Her first daughter was only two months old when Farhan attended her first UN meeting.

Today, that daughter is seven years old and proud of her mother’s work.

Farhan later had a second daughter, now one year old.

For her, the experience challenges a deeply rooted social assumption: that successful women must inevitably sacrifice either their careers or their families.

She rejects the idea that women should have to choose.

At universities such as LUMS, she tells young women that professional success and a fulfilling family life can coexist.

The issue, in her view, is not whether women can do both, but whether society will continue imposing stereotypes that tell them they cannot.

A career of purpose

Looking back at roughly two decades in development, Farhan describes her career in stages.

The first ten years were spent as a practitioner, learning directly from communities and understanding the realities of development on the ground.

The next phase took her into global policymaking, where she worked at the international level and gained insight into how major institutions approach development challenges.

The past decade has increasingly been about connecting the dots—advising governments, development organisations and businesses and building coalitions capable of turning ideas into practical solutions.

The thread running through all three stages is her insistence on combining idealism with economics.

Development, she argues, becomes sustainable when there is a business case for it—when households, women, communities, governments and the wider economy all have something tangible to gain.

That philosophy is particularly relevant to women’s empowerment.

Training programmes may produce impressive numbers, but if women cannot sell what they produce, access finance, control their earnings or connect with consumers, the impact may not last.

The real challenge is therefore not simply to create programmes.

It is to create systems that work.

“Sit yourself in the driving seat”

Farhan describes herself as a short-term thinker.

She focuses on today, tomorrow and the next immediate goal, rather than trying to map out her entire future.

Looking back, however, she says her 20-year journey leaves her both proud and humbled.

She does not claim to know what her ultimate legacy will be.

Her aspiration is simpler: that when she looks back on her life, her work brings a smile to her face and gives her peace that she did as much as she could.

And her message to young women is equally direct.

Believe in yourself.

Do not compromise your goals.

Do not allow the expectations attached to being a mother, daughter, daughter-in-law or friend to completely erase your own ambitions.

Farhan describes the pressure placed on women as a “pressure cooker approach”: the expectation to perform every role perfectly can eventually become overwhelming.

Her answer is not to reject those roles, but to stop treating them as a reason to abandon oneself.

“Sit yourself in the driving seat of your life,” is the philosophy she offers.

People will talk. People will speculate. Critics will question whether something can be done.

The only way to know is to try.

A different legacy

Fiza Farhan’s story is ultimately less about a list of positions than about a particular way of thinking about change.

From the villages where she first encountered women working in informal economies to international policy rooms, she has carried the same lesson: people do not need to be treated simply as recipients of development; they need the tools, connections and opportunities to become drivers of it.

For women in places such as Azad Kashmir, that means moving beyond the traditional language of empowerment toward practical economic pathways—better skills, stronger products, access to finance, digital literacy, payment systems, logistics and markets.

For Farhan herself, it means continuing to build bridges between the sectors that possess those pieces.

Her next chapter remains unwritten.

But her philosophy is clear: take the next opportunity, build the next partnership, solve the next problem—and keep moving.

And perhaps, in that approach, lies the legacy she hopes for: not simply having occupied influential positions, but having helped create an ecosystem in which more women can finally occupy the driver’s seat of their own lives.