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Maria Umar founded a social enterprise that mobilizes a home-based female workforce to earn digital livelihoods for economic empowerment. No matter where the women live, WDL ensures that they will always be able to find work, with just a computer and an internet connection.
Maria Umar is another young aspiring social entrepreneur who is training women to secure their future through digital livelihood. A born leader, Maria was concerned about other women who were facing similar circumstances, which lead to her conceiving and creating the Women’s Digital League (WDL). Today WDL is recognized as a major player in women’s development..
As many social enterprises, this one too was very personal cause for Maria Umar. Like many young mothers, she was busy working at a school and maintaining a home. She was laid off during a troublesome second pregnancy– it was then she decided to take charge of her career and life and started work as a freelancer.
I have been associated closely with Maria for 6 years and have been a member of her board, assisting her with strategy, negotiations, program development and advising her in her journey to build this noble initiative. I am sure her inspiring story will help many young women follow similar paths by helping others to improve their livelihood.
Maria’s Story
BEGINNINGS
She is the first woman in her family to have a Master’s degree in English Literature in 2003 and considering her family background, her parents made her promise that she will get married as soon as she turned 20; complying to their wishes she got married while she was still in university. She started working in a school and was the first woman in her family to step out of her home to work. However, she was let go off her teaching position when she was pregnant with her second baby due to a nonexistent maternity leave policy.
Maria worked from home writing English content on a salary for someone, however, upon research realized she could make much more money if she worked directly with freelance client platforms like oDesk and Elance. In 2009, she started working as a virtual assistant on these platforms, learning how to bid for projects directly and how to get more work and soon thought of giving work to women like her in her community and network. Much to her surprise she started earning double that she was earning at her teaching position!
Soon she built a stellar reputation on the platforms that she was working on, so she started outsourcing some of the work to family and friends — until she realized she had her own network.
DREAM BIG
Having experienced success in getting work online, she started making plans to extend her network to other women who also had limitations in doing a typical job – Women living in remote areas constrained by distances, culture, or familial responsibilities.
Her idea was to provide work to educated women who lived in remote rural areas of the country who were unable to work due to socio-cultural limitations and form a network of women across the country to work on digital tasks. The aim of the social enterprise is to empower women to work online from the comfort of their homes
Without a background in business, Maria’s startup idea was just that – an idea in the air. To her great surprise, a whole plethora of possibilities opened up before her eyes. That’s how Women’s Digital League (WDL) was born in 2009 — from an idea, some encouragement, and an initiative by some amazing women helping empower other women.
The WDL provides training and work for these women in various fields such as content writing, transcription, medical billing, ghost writing, graphic design, data entry, voiceovers, website content development, and everything that can be done from home with access to a computer and the Internet.
INTERNATIONAL RECOGNITION
Maria worked hard getting more women connecting to her network which paid off when one day she was able to connect to Azhar Rizvi. At that time Azhar Rizvi was working in the MITEF Global Board. He sent Maria a message on Facebook, inviting her to participate in the GIST ‘I Dare’ competition scheduled for May 2012 in Dubai.
Azhar helped coach and mentor her along the way, helped whet her application and give her feedback along the way. They met again at an IT conference in Islamabad and Azhar appreciated the work she was doing and gave her constructive advice on how to go about growing her business. Maria found this refreshing as many had shot down her idea.
In 2015 and she included Azhar Rizvi as a chairman and board member of Women’s Digital League. She says, “To an entrepreneur who is on a mission to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, mentors like Azhar Rizvi are the North Star guiding us in the right direction.”
Maria went through a 3-week business management and leadership course jointly sponsored by the US State Department’s Global Women’s Initiative office and Goldman Sachs. She graduated as both a participant of Project Artemis, where she was trained for two weeks at the Thunderbird School of Global Management, and as a participant of the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women program.
Maria has truly broken walls concerning online work through her unwavering dedication. She was a finalist in GIST I Dare business plan competition, and nominated as a thought leader in Asoka Changemakers Program. WDL continues to partner with World Bank, Enclude and others to developing training programs. And her work is recognized internationally by Mashable, Forbes, Virgin, Dawn and CNN.
Advises Maria, “ Stop being a victim of circumstances. Take a good look at your life and accept what cannot be fixed. Focus on what can be improved or changed first. The first step to making your dreams come true is to have the courage to dream them…and work towards them.”
To read the full story of Maria Umar, read Azhar Rizvi’s book Entrepreneuring Pakistan.
