Gohar Aman Foundation is setup after the name of my late father. Gohar Aman hailed from a small village, Ahmedabad, located in the picturesque Hunza valley of Gilgit-Baltistan. With no education and limited means my father was an ordinary man, but possessed an extraordinary passion and love for education. He lived and worked Karachi for most of his life. He spent most of what he had earned through
a small business to educate his close and extended family members so much so that his name became synonymous with making sacrifices for education. More importantly his passion was infectious as his example was emulated by many others. He passed away in 2007. Despite running a modest yet relatively successful business he did not leave any material assets, but left a legacy that we would love to follow. Gohar Aman Foundation is setup to institutionalize his legacy. Since 2007 we used private funds to support education initatives in two small villages in Hunza, Ahmedabad and Salmanabad. Six years down the line Gohar Aman Foundation wishes to re-orient its approach based two basic principles:
1) Private funds would be leveraged to harness more support. Private funds mostly come from H&H Consulting (it is a private company we own)
2) Focus would be more on adopting business approach to tackle education and health initiatives
As a first step to towards re-orientation Gohar Aman Foundation is planning to setup a charity shop in Hunza. Charity shop would collect donations of used articles (ranging from clothes to books and utensils) and sell those articles at highly discounted prices. The income from the charity shop will be used to support education for the poor. Part of the support could be in the form of cash transfers to pay school fee and books for the poor children, but incrementally more support would be provided in the form of interest-free loans to poor families to setup micro-enterpises to support education of their children. So long as the families use the income from the micro-enterprise to pay for education no interest would be charged. With a consignment of used but good quality clothes collected from family members and some friends we are beginning the charity shop. Transportation and packaging costs would be met by the foundation from its private funds.
