E01 Building Pakistan with Dr. Amjad Saqib (Akhuwat, CEO/Founder)

Building Pakistan with Benje Williams

Dr. Amjad Saqib is the Founder and CEO of Akhuwat, Pakistan’s largest Islamic microfinance institution. It is also one of the few social enterprises that has managed to cross the chasm and reach incredible scale, becoming a north star for so many entrepreneurs in the social sector. Their team of 5,500 employees has reached over 2.5 million households across their 700 branches in just 16 years, and today we will dig into how they have managed to do this. We’ll also talk about phase 2 of Akhuwat, which is the exciting work they are doing in education through Akhuwat University, Akhuwat College, over 250 schools that they’ve adopted, and a lot more. Dr. Saqib is aslo not a typical entrepreneur, in that his background is as a civil servant officer, and so we’ll also get to understand more about what makes Dr. Amjad Saqib Dr. Amjad Saqib: some of his spiritual beliefs, practices and rituals, and the inspiration behind his work and his journey. *Building Pakistan is brought to you by the team at Amal Academy (amalacademy.org), with support from +Acumen (plusacumen.org) as our distribution partner. Illustrations and production editing are by Awais Farooq (Amal Academy). Music is provided by Danny Roberts (dannyroberts.com), Lydia Cole and Ryan Baxley.