Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)

Salma Abbasi, described as a visionary leader who executes, with her dynamic drive and positive energy has proven to be a great motivator, both for professionals and community workers. Salma Abbasi has been engaged with community development since her childhood. She is a passionate social worker, generous donor and philanthropist. She has been actively involved in community work and social development of marginalized communities around the world in multiple dimensions. Salma is using her network to help promote sustainable socio-economic development by providing practical skills development to support Income Generation along with “state of the art” - cost effective “ICT” solutions in multiple dimensions; e-commerce, e-business, e-education and telemedicine to leverage best practices and help improve the “Quality of life” of marginalized communities around the world.

Salma started her social work as a volunteer working for the elderly people and battered women and for children with special needs. From this voluntary social work Salma became more engaged with the community and started working in the realm of Human Rights, in the area of violence against women and gender empowerment through financial independence and also supporting women to build their confidence and personal skills development. This work led Salma to focus on Sustainable development where she launched into philanthropic work. She provided financial support and support to a variety of entrepreneurship and income generation programs across the developing world. She  focused on marginalized communities specifically women and youth by working closely with the United Nations, various International development agencies and governments in an advisory capacity and thus created strategies for socio-economic development and women’s empowerment.

Community Cohesion; Salma Abbasi has also been actively working in the space of community cohesion. She created a unique relationship by initially uniting the mosques in the Bay area, USA and the Bay area Muslims by bringing non-perishable food items to the mosque at Juma prayer. She then subsequently created a formal relationship between the Bay area mosques and the Catholic organization, the Sacred Hearts to deliver food items and clothes on every Friday for the homeless community of the Bay area. She has also coordinated for the creation and distribution of family food gift boxes for marginalized people, which were offered with compliments from the Bay area Muslims. This has increased the mutual understanding and acceptance across both communities. Salma also founded a non-profit organization in California called “Rahima” with Sister Habibe Hussain, concentrating on assisting the marginalized people in the Bay Area community.

Salma Abbasi also performed counselling of first generation of Asian American young Muslim girls on cultural clashes and established “mother and daughter” tea parties to encourage dialogue between both the generations and get the better understanding of invisible social pressures faced by the youth.

Preventing violence against women; Salma has been actively involved in multiple activities for preventing violence against women. She created a support group for counselling the battered women in the Bay area, USA. For this purpose, she created a network of professional support services they required from the South Asian women’s group i-e, Nari. She also worked with local Imams, Sheikh Hamza Yousaf, Santa Clara and Mr. Siddiqui, San Jose, to counsel the men in the Khutba for not beating their wives. She conducted confidence building workshops and the reintegration of battered women into the society. She also created a network with professional women to provide clothes for homeless women. Salma also supported the Women Crisis Centre in Jacobabad, in rural Sindh, Pakistan, where she conducted workshops on networking with other support organizations to build awareness in women about their rights from an Islamic perspective.

Children with special needs; Salma Abbasi has a great compassion for the disabled communities and has been actively supporting them in multiple areas.  One of the hospitals she has helped is Dar-e-Sakoon where she provided ultrasonic equipment from Europe. She also supported schools for the blind children, where she has donated a large quantity of items like Braille books, videos, toys, learning games etc for the children in collaboration with the Royal Blind Institute, London, UK. She has also supported schools for the deaf where she provided transportation facility for the students with no means of transportation from Kachi Abadies, Urban Slums to the schools in Karachi.

Basic Literacy and IT Education; Understanding the importance of Education and Computer Literacy for socio-economic development, Salma Abbasi supported the establishment of primary schools in rural Nigeria in Kaduna state by providing visual aid and sports material for the school. She has been donating computers for the lab set up in schools with limited means. She donated complete computer lab equipment to a model School in Karachi. She is now looking to build training centres in the rural areas and support Government Schools. Salma Collaborated with a young woman from Peshawar to set up a computer training centre in 2002 to offer computer training skills exclusively to women. This computer centre was owned, managed and run exclusively by women and became a self sustainable venture for the young female entrepreneurs.

Income Generation and Entrepreneurship Development; Salma Abbasi supported multiple Income Generation initiatives for improving the quality of lives of marginalized communities specifically women living in the rural areas of Sindh, Peri-Urban Slums in Karachi, Refugee Camps in Kashmir and plantations in Africa. She donated sewing machines, Knitting Machines, Weaving Machines and Cooking Equipment that provided the women with means to generate income while working from homes. This donation was made for the women who were trapped in poverty, without the means and collateral for a bank loan to get on their feet and who are the sole providers of an extended family. This donation brought great success by improving their financial empowerment so that they could manage their lives and their families and communities. Ms Anita Ghulam Ali played a critical role in helping administer these items in the Peri-Urban Slums in Karachi.

Similar initiatives were conducted for women in Kashmir and Africa. Salma donated goats and cows to the women in Kashmir, which were used for the purpose of Income Generation. She also donated sewing and knitting machines which resulted in the emergence of many new female entrepreneurs that became tailors, providers for local stores with their knit wears and clothes. Salma Collaborated with the Pak Army in NWFP and AJK during the earthquake to help find simple innovative Income Generation Schemes such as; sewing clothes for the people in the camps, cooking food for the people in the camps and providing beauty care for the international voluntary workers for desolate women that were left helpless and hopeless after the earthquake in 2005. Salma also supported women in catering, by providing funds for purchasing goods and making flyers to market the services.

Capacity Building for Youth and Women; Salma Abbasi launched Pakistan’s First Women’s Leadership Forum (WLF) in December, 2002 in Karachi. It is a platform, created to facilitate change and support women to start and run their own Business. A regular “Forum” where entrepreneur women could present their business cases, plan, goals and requirements to people from private and public sectors and donor organizations. This helped them in providing the support in multiple dimensions to help take their businesses to the next level of success.

Salma also supported and greatly contributed in a two day workshop organized by UNIDO and Microsoft in Kampala and Uganda for creating the awareness on the usage of ICT tools for the improvement in productivity and efficiency in SMEs. Salma Abbasi has been conducting and participating as a speaker in several international capacity building conferences and workshops around the world.

She organized the Pakistan’s First International ICT4D conference in March, 2007, in three major cities of Pakistan; Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi through inviting youth from diverse areas and backgrounds. This conference was focusing on Sustainable Development through Income Generation and Gender Empowerment. The objective of this workshop was to allow the marginalized people of Pakistan to use ICTs as an enabler for Income Generation and support the Government’s initiatives to meet the MDGs (Millennium Development Goals). Additionally, this platform was used to create a working group of ICT users and build a support network for success.  This conference was based on sharing the best practices, lessons learned, and critical success factors for sustainability. International speakers were invited from India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Cambodia and UK along with experts from Pakistan.

Disaster Support; Salma Abbasi has been very active in fund raising and disaster support activities around the world. She conducted relief work for the flood victims in Bangladesh and organized a fund raising concert in UK for flood affected people. She also organized fund raising concerts in Bosnia and Palestine to support the marginalized people of these countries. She also provided medical equipment, food items and clothes for affected people in Bosnia.

She greatly supported the earthquake victims of Kashmir by providing financial assistance and relief goods. She worked with the army and personally visited the devastated areas and to ensure that the relief goods were provided to the deserving people. She then, worked with UNESCO to provide “School in Box” kits for various camps in North West Frontier Province and Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK).

ICT 4 Peace; Salma Abbasi is also working in the space of global peace and driving interfaith harmony, dialogue, and awareness through ICTs to bridge the socio-religious divide and promote respect for humanity in multi-cultural societies globally. She was engaged with the Suzanne Mubarak’s Women’s International Peace movement on The Cyber Peace Initiative, that aims at systematically enhancing the use of ICT and internet based tools to disseminate the culture of peace

Most recently She has designed a concept for protecting children from Cyber Space which was accepted by the Secretary General, ITU and now are jointly launching a global initiative to protect children from extremism, child pornography, sexual abuse, harassment, exploitation, brain washing for terrorist acts of violence and human trafficking.

Support to Governments in Advisory Capacity; Salma Abbasi has been working with multiple Governments in an advisory capacity for creating strategies for youth and women development. She established Women in Science & Technology, a Task Force under Technology Resource Mobilization Unit, a Project of Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunications. This task force developed projects such as; Entrepreneurial development program, Women Resource Centre, Women Data Bank and Computer training. She is also working with the Ministry of Science & Technology on various programs and initiatives to help and encourage women & children to embrace Science and Technology to drive these initiatives into the roots of Pakistan.