Forbes Asia recently has released its 30 under 30 Asia list for 2020. Five Pakistanis have made it to the list. Among those five Pakistanis that got featured in this highly prestigious list is social entrepreneur Bilal Bin Saqib.
For Bilal to be featured on the list as one of the most influential persons in the field of social entrepreneurship is the icing on the cake for his relentless efforts.
A social initiative to solve Pakistan’s water crisis
In an interview with a Pakistani newspaper, The 29-year-old revealed that as a young student in school, he was consistently told that he would never be able to achieve anything in life without making a massive improvement in his academic results.
It was later in the UK when he was pursuing his postgraduate studies that Bilal found out about having dyslexia, a learning disorder. This also explained his below-par academic results in school.
Source: Forbes
It was during his time in London where he studied at Queen Mary College and London School of Economics (LSE) where he initiated Tayaba, a social startup that focuses on providing solutions to the ongoing water crisis in Pakistan.
One of the most recent initiatives of Tayaba is the ‘H2O wheel’. The initiative is a plastic water-container directly connected to a metal bar that can be rolled on the ground.
Bilal’s project has been highly successful across rural areas, where women and children are required to travel for several miles with a clay pot on their heads to get drinking water for their families. The H2O wheel can carry nearly 40 liters of water. This is at least times more than what the clay pot can hold.
West Africa was the inspiration for Bilal
According to Bilal, he came across this thought-provoking idea when he traveled to West Africa.
Source: Tribune.pk
He said, “In West Africa, villagers were not transporting water on their heads. Instead, they were pushing or pulling clean water in a plastic wheel container connected to a metal bar.”
Bilal was impressed with the creativity of the West Africans. He then reproduced this idea in Pakistan. The water wheels can easily travel any surface. As per Bilal, Tayaba has distributed more than 5,500 H2O wheels in Pakistan. He also said that his enterprise was working on adding a water filter to the wheels as well.
Bilal concluded that his initiative could prove to be a timely rejoinder for the individuals facing challenges that is regarded as being invincible.
The eminent US-based magazine Forbes had previously included the name of Pakistani girl Fiza Farhan, in its list of 30 under 30 social entrepreneurs in 2015.
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