Three months in, many parents ask the same question, why does my child not know the alphabet yet. Tanzeela, founder of Little Angels Daycare and Early Childhood Development Centre in Gahkuch, Gilgit-Baltistan, hears it often, and her answer starts somewhere else. The first thing she looks at is whether the child is happy when they arrive at the centre, since a child who feels safe and comfortable is in a better position to learn. She describes the work of the centre as a triangle of parents, teachers and students, and says that if one side is missing the triangle cannot stand.
Tanzeela opened the centre in 2014 with six children after noticing that many women in Gahkuch worked full-time jobs but had no reliable childcare. The gap was a practical one, since women who could not find safe care for their young children often had to leave work or rely on relatives, and the centre was her answer to that problem. Today it serves between 90 and 100 children, which shows that the demand she saw in the early years was real and that families in the town trust the centre with their youngest children.
The centre has now caught the attention of Accelerate Prosperity Pakistan, part of the Aga Khan Development Network, which selected it as one of the shortlisted ventures in its Women in Business programme. The programme provides business training, advisory services and growth-stage funding to women-led enterprises, and it gives a small business like a daycare access to support that is hard to find in remote districts. For a centre that has grown by word of mouth over more than a decade, this kind of backing can help with planning, financial management and expansion.
The story also points to a wider need in Gilgit-Baltistan and across Pakistan, where childcare is scarce outside the big cities and women’s participation in the workforce depends on it. A community-led centre that works closely with parents and teachers, and that measures its success first by the happiness of the child, offers a model that other towns could follow. Accelerate Prosperity has shared a video showing how teachers, parents and the centre support children in their earliest years.
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