Growing up as refugees in Pakistan with limited access to teaching resources, we struggled to get the right education, but we managed to create opportunities for ourselves. Now, we want to help others to get that opportunity.

So Zamir Foundation was set to establish an online education centre providing free education to the younger generation. We were looking for the international community to donate not money, but skills and expertise. We began looking for a building and began to set up the institution. We had registered the Zamir Foundation in Europe and Afghanistan and then came COVID.

We knew we needed to act now. It wasn’t going to wait for us to create a comprehensive aid plan. We had a network in place so we moved to setting up educational materials and training people about COVID and how to reduce the spread of the virus.

As street vendors in particular were struggling to earn money due to COVID, Zamir Foundation also began providing food and support to them and helping to connect small enterprises to new markets to alleviate the impact of COVID on their businesses.

With this network in place when tens of thousands of people across the country began leaving their homes, living in tents with no food and winter on its way, it was clear that we were now well-placed to help provide emergency aid to these displaced communities.

We continue to focus on our core educational and health programmes and our goal remains to set up programmes that will live on beyond our lifetime, but building better futures for the younger generation also means saving their lives for that future, today.