OUR STORY

How Abilities Ignite came to be

This is not a story that started in a boardroom. It started in classrooms, in rehabilitation centres, in community halls, and in the quiet grief of a mother who wanted more for her son.

The experience that came first:

For over three decades, Mrs. Qamar Zahra worked at the Rehabilitation Centre for Children with Developmental Disorders (RCCDD) ,a government facility ,serving families from low-income backgrounds who had almost nowhere else to turn. Alongside her, Mrs. Yasmeen Zaidi built her career training teachers, supporting parents, and working on the early detection of developmental delays through the Parent Portage Programme. Between them, they accumulated not just years of experience but a very clear picture of what was missing in Pakistan's approach to neurodiverse children.

They saw children who were never assessed because no one near them could do it. They saw parents who blamed themselves because no one had ever explained what a learning difference actually was. They saw teachers who wanted to help but had been given no real tools to do so. And they saw a system that kept calling these children problems, when in fact, the problem was the system itself.

The personal wound:

For Mrs. Qamar Zahra, this was never just professional. Her own child was dyslexic. And despite producing thoughtful, effortful work, that child was labelled ,by teachers who should have known better, in a system that saw a deficit rather than a different kind of mind.

Mrs. Zahra sat in those meetings as both an expert and a mother. She knew the labels were wrong. She knew her child's potential. And she knew that if this was happening in her household, with all the knowledge she had ,it was happening in thousands of homes where parents had no idea how to respond.

That experience never left her.

The space that was built from love:

Meanwhile, Mrs. Sajida Mir Rind had lived a different but equally powerful story. Her son was born with Muscular Dystrophy. She spent years searching for proper care and support, and too often found empty hands. When her son passed away, she carried the question: what if the right space had existed?

The answer became the Mir Hasan Community Centre in Banigala, built as a living commitment that no child would be turned away for lack of the right space.

The moment it became an organisation:

The ideas, the experience, and the vision had existed for years. What was needed was someone to formalise them, to take everything these three women had built and witnessed and turn it into something structured, sustainable, and lasting.

That person was Qumnber Abidi (Mrs. Qamar Zahra's son).

With 13 years of his own experience in education, and a lifetime of watching his mother fight for children like his sibling, Qumnber understood both the urgency and the opportunity. He became the founder of Abilities Ignite Educational Foundation ,the person who gave shape, structure, and direction to a vision that had been quietly growing for decades.

Together, they built something that had never existed quite like this in Pakistan before, a space where neurodiverse children are not the problem to be fixed, but the reason everything is designed the way it is.

Our Visionaries in Action