TiE Islamabad has announced a strategic partnership with Sehat Kahani under the Digitalization for Women’s Economic Empowerment program, supported by UN Women Pakistan and the Korea International Cooperation Agency. The partnership brings together TiE Islamabad’s entrepreneurship network with Sehat Kahani, the Karachi-based telemedicine company founded by Iffat Zafar Aga and Sara Saeed Khurram that built its business model specifically around employing women doctors who work remotely, addressing a societal barrier where qualified women physicians are often prevented from working in traditional hospital settings.
The collaboration operates under D4WEE, a four-year initiative running from 2024 to 2028 and chaired at the national level by Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication, which aims to increase economic engagement of young women aged 18 to 35 through digital enablement and innovation. The programme has already run activities across six Pakistani cities including Lahore, Faisalabad, Multan, Mardan, Peshawar, and Swabi, and TiE Islamabad’s partnership with Sehat Kahani extends that broader national effort into a specific, sector-focused collaboration centered on digital health and telemedicine.
Through this partnership, the two organizations aim to create pathways for women to connect, grow, and thrive in an increasingly digital economy, pairing TiE Islamabad’s ecosystem-building experience with Sehat Kahani’s direct operational track record employing women in a digitally delivered healthcare model. Given that Sehat Kahani has already treated more than one million patients through its network of women doctors working from home, the partnership gives TiE Islamabad’s broader women’s empowerment work a concrete, tested case study of what digitally enabled economic participation for women can look like in practice, beyond training programmes alone.
TiE Islamabad framed the collaboration around building a more inclusive future where technology opens doors for women and enables meaningful economic opportunities, extending national D4WEE progress that has previously reported narrowing the gender gap in mobile internet usage from a range of 36 to 38 percent down to 25 percent. The partnership adds to a growing list of D4WEE-linked initiatives, including earlier city-based digital startup roundtables and the EmpowerHER Digital Tech Summit, continuing a coordinated push across government, UN agencies, and private sector organizations to close Pakistan’s digital gender divide.
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