Real roles and small ideas, from robotics to skill mapping

A small robotics activity with no formal programme and very limited resources. That is where Mariam Paktiawal started, in high school, trying to get girls to engage with STEM. "It was not a formal program and had very limited resources, but it gave me early experience in trying to introduce technical learning in a restrictive environment," she says.

Since then she has built her experience "by taking on real roles and small initiatives rather than a single defined startup", while studying Computer Science.

“The truth is, hope is not ignorance; it's a deliberate, exhausting choice you make every single morning. It's looking at a broken system and deciding to build a small, functional corner of it anyway. I don't build because I'm naive. I build because I've seen what happens when no one does.”

Mariam Paktiawal

After school, with limited access to formal opportunities, she kept learning on her own, through online fellowships and self-study in programming and digital skills. She has worked as a Project Coordinator and Business Analyst at a logistics company, where she supported project coordination, assisted with government-related contract processes and did basic market and operational analysis. "This gave me practical exposure to how real organizational systems and decisions work," she says.

Alongside that, she has worked as a translator for humanitarian and development projects and as a narrator for educational audio content. She tutors in STEM.

The idea she is exploring now is around education access and skill mapping tools for young people in low-opportunity environments. It is early. "This is still in the exploration and testing stage, not a developed startup," she says.

"Right now, I am still in a transition stage," she says, "building skills through real work, testing small ideas, and slowly narrowing toward one focused problem I can turn into a proper project or startup."