Aga Khan Rural Support Programme, under its flagship START Apna Karobar programme, trained 55 aspiring young entrepreneurs from Shigar in business development through an intensive boot camp. Of these, 30 innovative business ideas were selected to move forward into Enterprise Advisory Training, a structured next stage that narrows a broad cohort of early participants down to the ideas judged most ready for further development, mentorship, and eventual funding consideration.
Participants subsequently presented their ideas before a judging panel in Shigar, with one judge describing the experience as humbling, noting that watching young entrepreneurs defend ideas they had built from scratch, some nervous but all determined, was a reminder that real change does not start with funding but with someone believing their idea is worth the room. Selected entrepreneurs from this pitching round are now set to receive seed financing to turn their ideas into viable enterprises, giving Shigar’s cohort a direct pathway from training through to actual capital rather than concluding with recognition alone.
The programme is implemented under the Global Affairs Canada supported BEST4WEER project, and its reach across Gilgit-Baltistan and Chitral has grown substantially since launch, having received 8,987 applications and trained 4,588 aspiring entrepreneurs through outreach boot camps region-wide. Of those trained, 2,611 participants have gone on to receive Enterprise Advisory Training, with 2,582 participants having pitched their ideas so far, a conversion rate that reflects a programme designed to filter a large initial applicant pool down through successive, more intensive stages of support rather than spreading resources thinly across every applicant equally.
To date, 802 entrepreneurs across the broader programme have received seed financing, and 514 have benefited from post-training assistance, giving START Apna Karobar a track record extending well beyond a single district’s cohort. The programme’s structure, and its particular focus on remote and mountainous districts such as Shigar and Ghanche, addresses a segment of Pakistan’s entrepreneurship ecosystem that receives comparatively little attention relative to the incubation activity concentrated in Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad, extending structured business training, mentorship, and seed capital to young entrepreneurs in Gilgit-Baltistan who would otherwise have limited access to comparable support.
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