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CHAPTER 11 · THE ROOMS WE BORROWED

Wherever The Laptop Fit.

Sukkur conference halls, the school of leadership, IBA classrooms, a training room in a rural NGO. We took the same three slides everywhere. Slide one, every time: why am i here?

A hall looking at a slide that reads Why am I here?
slide one, every time.
Saba in green speaking to students in a lecture hall
a university in sukkur. 'raaji — powered by sindh rural support organisation.'
Raaji projected in a small room with women on the floor
a borrowed projector, a rented room, the anatomy lesson on the wall.
Saba with four colleagues in an office
the karachi team.
WHAT I LEARNED BUILDING HER

The AI was the easy part — dialogflow, a few hundred intents, a voice in Urdu. The hard part was the room: who's allowed to ask, who's allowed to answer, who gets a laptop and who gets sent home. 89% of the mothers we surveyed in Larkana, Shahdadkot and Sukkur believed a girl's first period made her ready for marriage. That's not a chatbot problem. That's why the champions mattered more than the code.

That's still the work. Poetica just does it for artists and nonprofits now — the machine handles the paperwork so the human can sit in the room.

RECOGNITION
  • → MIT Solve · Vodafone Americas Foundation Innovation for Women Prize, 2019
  • → Roddenberry Foundation Catalyst Fund · BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt · UNFPA
  • → World Summit Awards impact story · tve Global Sustainability Film Award at BAFTA, 2018 — the animated series
  • → U.S. State Department IVLP, AI for Social Good · Visiting Social Entrepreneur, Stanford GSB
  • → Covered by ITU AI for Good, Pioneers Post, Tech for Good, Express Tribune, Feminism in India
where she started: qandeel →
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SABA KHALID · POETICA STUDIO
saba@poetica.studio