NIC Karachi hosted an exclusive Canva AI Camp titled Canva for Founders, bringing together members of the wider startup community across two halls for a full-house, hands-on learning experience built around Canva’s artificial intelligence-powered design tools and the practical application of those tools to the branding and communication challenges that early-stage founders face daily. The event welcomed the Canva MENAP Team, including Ahmad Iqbal, General Manager for Middle East, North Africa and Pakistan, Rania H, Head of Small and Medium Business for MENAP, Fatima Malik, and Muhammad Yasin, Community Manager for Pakistan, whose combined expertise gave participants direct access to the people who understand Canva’s product and its application within the specific business and cultural context of Pakistan’s startup ecosystem.
The workshop was facilitated by Sheikh Hammad Amjad, whose opening exercise set the tone for the day before a single design tool had been opened. A tower-building challenge using sticks, tape, and a marshmallow introduced participants to the principles of creativity, collaboration, and structured problem-solving in a way that was immediately engaging and that created a shared energy in the room before the session moved into the more technical content of the Canva platform. This kind of warm-up activity, which might seem peripheral to a design workshop, reflects an understanding that learning is more effective and more retained when participants are in an active and collaborative state rather than a passive reception mode, particularly for a community of founders who are accustomed to working under pressure and who bring strong opinions about their own communication needs and challenges into any learning environment.
The main content of the session covered Canva’s AI-powered features, branding tools, and the time-saving workflows that allow founders and small teams to produce professional-quality design output without the budget for dedicated design resources or the time to develop deep design expertise independently. For startup founders managing multiple functions simultaneously, the ability to create consistent and visually strong brand assets, social media content, pitch decks, and marketing materials quickly and without external dependency is a practical competitive advantage that compounds over time as the brand develops recognition and coherence. Participants put their learning into immediate practice by designing their own social media posts during the session, creating the kind of applied learning experience that moves knowledge from abstract understanding into demonstrated capability within the workshop itself.
The event’s success reflected the work of Canva Community Karachi City Leads Tooba Khan and Barirah Zaidi, whose coordination and dedication behind the scenes made the collaboration between NIC Karachi and the Canva MENAP Team possible and whose community relationships contributed directly to the strong turnout that filled both halls. NIC Karachi’s partnership with Canva Community Karachi for this event represents a continuation of the productive relationship between the two organisations that has been building through previous collaborative events, and the scale and quality of the Canva AI Camp suggests that both communities are investing in a relationship that can produce events of increasingly significant impact for Karachi’s startup and creative professional ecosystem. Supported by Ignite and the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication alongside partners including Tech Destination Pakistan, LMKT, LuckyOne Mall, and Orbit Ventures, NIC Karachi continues to build the kind of ecosystem partnerships that deliver tangible and immediately applicable value to the founders it supports.
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