IBA Center for Entrepreneurial Development, Innovation and Research is participating in Accelerate Prosperity’s ESO Program, an initiative built around a specific diagnosis of Pakistan’s entrepreneurship support landscape, that every entrepreneurship support organization in the country is essentially working on the same underlying problem but doing so in isolation from one another. Rather than treating this fragmentation as an unavoidable feature of a growing ecosystem, the ESO Program is explicitly designed to bring these organizations together for shared learning and collective impact, treating coordination itself as a lever for improving outcomes across the sector.
In a video discussing the program, Lalarukh Ejaz, director of IBA CEDIR, explains why stronger connections between ecosystem players matter, drawing on her own long-running experience heading one of Pakistan’s more established entrepreneurial development centers, one that has supported more than 400 graduated companies since its founding in 2009. Her perspective carries particular weight given IBA CEDIR’s own extensive footprint across incubation, pre-incubation, and specialized training programs, giving her direct insight into where duplicated effort across different organizations tends to occur and where genuine collaboration could meaningfully reduce that redundancy.
The program is helping organizations rethink program design, pushing entrepreneurship support organizations to examine whether their existing curricula and support structures are still serving founders effectively or have simply persisted out of institutional habit. Building referral networks forms another core component, addressing a practical gap where a founder who is a poor fit for one organization’s specific programming often has nowhere structured to be redirected, resulting in either a mismatched placement or the founder falling out of the ecosystem’s support entirely.
Exploring new partnerships rounds out the program’s focus, treating cross-organizational collaboration not as a nice-to-have but as a structural necessity given that entrepreneurship support organizations frequently serve overlapping founder populations without any formal mechanism to share insight or coordinate support. Accelerate Prosperity, operating as part of the Aga Khan Development Network’s broader work stimulating businesses in regions where economic opportunities remain scarce, frames the ESO Program as recognition that stronger startups ultimately need a stronger system behind them, one where entrepreneurship support organizations function as a connected network rather than a scattered collection of isolated efforts.
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