Harnessing Peoples Potential

  From Wrenches to Wedding Makeup: How One Pakistani Institute is Training a Million Hands In a cramped workshop on the outskirts of Multan, 32-year-old Rashid Ahmed no longer just fixes flat tires. He now runs a diagnostic system for 50 motorbikes a week. Ten kilometers away, Sadia Bibi, a 24-year-old mother of two, transforms brides with contour kits she never knew existed two years ago. They have never met. But both credit the same quiet giant for their transformation: the Institute of Rural Management (IRM). While Pakistan debates foreign aid and government subsidies, IRM—a Section-42 company and part of the Rural Support Programme (RSP)—has quietly trained over 1.5 million people across more than 100 districts since 1993. And if you ask the mechanics and makeup artists of Punjab, they will tell you: IRM does not just teach skills. It teaches dignity. The Mechanic Who Learned to Count Customers Rashid Ahmed dropped out of school in 8th grade. For 12 years, he worked on the floo...

  The first time I met Dr. Roomi S. Hayat, he was sipping tea at a small roadside dhaba, surrounded by men in dusty shawls who called him sahib but teased him like a cousin. That’s when I realised this Harvard-trained engineer-turned-anthropologist is not your typical development expert. Dr. Hayat holds a doctorate in Anthropology from Quaid-e-Azam University and an executive management certificate from Harvard Business School. But ask him for his real qualification, and he laughs. “Mechanical engineering,” he says. “From New Jersey Institute of Technology. I fix people now, not machines.” And fix people he has. As CEO of the Institute of Rural Management (IRM) since 2010, he leads Pakistan’s largest training and research service provider—over 100 regional offices across the country. I watched him brief a team on a World Bank project in one breath and quote a Thari folk poem in the next. His career reads like a masterclass in rural development. For 18 years at the National Rural Su...