Why she left a global Cisco role to rebuild Pakistani charity

From a restrictive Riyadh to a freer Pakistan

The episode opens with Muzamil framing a journey most listeners would not predict in reverse. Kanwal Cheema spent sixteen years at Cisco — a 160-billion-dollar company — rose to a global sales role based out of Australia, and then left all of it to move back to Pakistan and start a social-impact company. Before any of that, the conversation winds back to where she actually grew up.

She was born in Islamabad, at PIMS, but most of her childhood was in Riyadh, where both her parents worked as doctors. She moved through American and British schools there. The Saudi Arabia of the late nineties and early two-thousands was, in her words, “very restrictive” — she remembers not being able to go to a restaurant with friends without a male mehram. When the time came for O levels, she chose Pakistan. The quality of education in Riyadh may have been better, she concedes, but “in terms of being a woman, and the liberation that women have, that was much more in Pakistan.”

She came back to live with her grandmother and do A levels at Froebel’s in Islamabad. It was the first time she lived without her parents, and the first taste of real independence — the strict grandmother softened over time, and Kanwal learned to maneuver. Those two years at Froebel’s, she says, were her “initial self-discovery.” Her grades, by her own account, fell apart. She had been a conscientious, organised, top-of-the-class student under a rigid system. When the stick was removed, she had to learn how to regulate herself, and she failed at it for a while before figuring it out.

The biology exam she walked away from

Both her parents were doctors, and her father — the eldest of a poor village family who became a doctor and pulled the rest of his siblings up after him — wanted her to follow. She refused, and the refusal was not subtle. Watching her gynaecologist mother carry “the dreaded pager,” pulled away at three in the morning, on Eid, in the middle of family dinners, had built up an “off switch” in her head about the profession. So on the day of her A-level biology paper, she simply did not go. She did not sit it. She did not tell her father until afterward, on an international call where she remembers a two-to-three-minute silence — expensive silence, in those days.

Computer science at FAST was not, she is clear, a passionate choice. “It wasn’t like it was a conscious choice,” she says — it was that she would not become a doctor, and any good university outside medicine would do. FAST in 2001 was a young institution with no legacy in Islamabad. She got in.

Underneath the rebellion, though, was something her father gave her that she keeps returning to: belief. He came from nothing and thought she was exceptional, and “his belief in me became eventually my belief in me.” She traces a voice in her head — the one that tells her she is wasting her life when she sleeps too much or watches too much Netflix — directly back to him. “I have to do something. I have to leave a legacy.”

What FAST actually taught her

The four years at FAST were, in her telling, both “hell” and “the best four years.” The coursework, she argues honestly, did not transfer as much as the rest of it. What transferred was the grind. In a class of fifty with only a handful of women, she was one of the few who genuinely loved programming, which meant she carried non-programmers through group projects. She tells one story of going six days and nights straight on a project, sleeping half an hour at a desk, then winning a national-level competition at NASCON, walking back with a trophy, lifting it for her grandmother — and fainting.

She was also president of the debating society, president of the school, head of the magazine, chief coordinator of NASCON. Her GPA wasn’t great. But “those extracurriculars contributed as much, if not more,” she says, than the course work. FAST taught her grit, negotiation, assertiveness, how to carry herself, how to read political situations. The professors were mentors and father figures — small classes, open doors, no appointments needed. When her father died, she found herself crying in front of Doctor Aftab, the director, “because for me he is a father figure.”

There is a gendered thread here she names directly. As a woman in a heavy minority at FAST, she was still president of nearly everything, and the mentors there did not carry the “unconscious patriarchy” she would meet later. During a religious phase she covered herself completely, so even the variable of looks was off the table — it was “purely substance.” That foundation, she believes, is what let her hold her own later as “a woman in a man’s world.”

Nine thousand applicants, one seat

Cisco was almost too good to be true. The company was hiring five or six people from each of fifty-nine countries for a one-year program in Amsterdam — the Cisco Sales Associate Program. From Pakistan, nine thousand people applied. Five hundred made it past the CV stage. Thirty-three were flown to Dubai — her first time in a five-star hotel — for three days of intensive interviews, dinners, and observed group activities. Six were selected. She was the only woman.

The year in Amsterdam, with young graduates from fifty-nine countries — Israelis and Palestinians in the same cohort — reshaped how she thought. “At the very basic level, we are very similar,” she says; the differences are individual, not national. Whatever inherent biases and stereotypes she carried broke there. She also met her husband in that program.

The sixteen years that followed were not one job but many. She worked across commercial, enterprise, public sector, and service provider verticals; moved from system engineering into sales; led accounts, then became a global account director. She was based in Pakistan, then the Middle East, then Australia. By 2008 she was the only woman system engineer in Cisco’s entire Middle East and Africa region — and the only woman from Pakistan at Cisco at all. For those who don’t know the company, she explains it plainly: Cisco is “the company behind the internet,” the switches, routers, and infrastructure telcos deploy to move packets from one computer to another.

The global role came with a punishing rhythm. In 2018 she made eighteen trips between Sydney and Silicon Valley — fourteen- and fifteen-hour flights, each way. She had young children. “Your life is a nightmare,” Muzamil offers, and she agrees. What made it work, she says, was a husband who treated parenting as an equal partnership, and a belief in quality of presence over quantity.

When money stops being the point

She left Cisco in 2020. The reasons started building in 2016 and intensified by 2018. She describes it as a second self-discovery — not the teenage kind, but the older kind, where you ask where your life is going and what you’ll leave behind. Muzamil reads it as an early midlife reckoning, arriving in her early-to-mid thirties rather than her forties.

By then she had earned enough that money had stopped shaping her decisions. “The marginal utility of money starts to become less,” she says — how much better can you really eat, dress, or live? The ladder ahead was visible and uninspiring: director, then VP, then SVP, then maybe a CXO role, maybe CEO of some large corporation someday. “But is that what I want? Is that it?”

She frames the math through her own faith. This life, on this planet, is a vanishingly small fraction of a much longer existence — and how she performs in that fraction dictates the rest. Asked whether she was actually maximising her gifts in that sliver, the answer was no; she was focused on herself, her family, her career. That answer, refined over a couple of years of conversations and false starts, eventually pointed in one direction. “I have to make the sacrifice. I have to get out of my comfort zone.”

The four pillars of My Impact Meter

While the awakening was happening, she did an MBA and a degree in social impact from the University of New South Wales, and found the same gaps everywhere in the sector: misappropriation of funds, costly fundraising, friction, and failures of traceability, visibility, and equitability. Her question was simple. Technology transformed ride-sharing through Uber and Careem, and hospitality through Airbnb, removing friction and adding transparency wherever it touched — so why not charity, where the need is greater than anywhere else?

My Impact Meter, she explains, rests on four pillars. The first is a “mall of NGOs” — trusted, verified organisations in one place, with reporting above a certain threshold. The second is a services ecosystem that lets a donor give a specific person ration, groceries, or skills directly, without wounding their dignity. The third is education. The fourth is the technology layer that ties it together.

The mechanism that makes it work is the CNIC. Every person added to the platform is uniquely identified by their national ID card — you cannot add a beneficiary without one. Against that ID, every benefit a person receives builds a visible history. If you add your driver and someone else adds the same driver, both can see what he has already received, from you or from anyone. That single design choice attacks the problem Muzamil raises from the 2022 floods: aid that pooled at the first accessible villages — twenty and thirty times what those families needed — while the poorest, sitting further out and rurally, got nothing. During those floods, Al-Khidmat, a major partner NGO, verified and added the poorest widows from across Pakistan to the platform, so a donor in the US could pick one, see her history, and gift monthly ration. Benefits never go out as cash; a voucher arrives by SMS, redeemable at a nearby store, with the receipt uploaded and the shopkeeper paid digitally.

The case against charity that creates nothing

Muzamil offers an unpopular view: charity in Pakistan often produces negative outcomes, incentivising consumption and dependence — paying someone handsomely to do nothing while haggling with the plumber who actually works. Kanwal says she shares the philosophy “ten times as aggressively.” She never gives to the beggar at the signal, and especially not to one displaying a disability, because she knows that giving is exactly what drives the behaviour. A core reason she built the platform, she says, was visibility — to stop incentivising begging while still ensuring no child sleeps hungry or stunted.

On education, the numbers she cites are stark. Sixty-four percent of Pakistan’s population is under thirty — roughly 148 million people — and only about six percent of them reach university, by a UNDP report. The country’s demographic advantage, she argues, becomes a national emergency if those young people can’t find work. Her answer is EarnTech — “Seekho aur Kamao” — which connects diaspora sponsors to IT and vocational training. For roughly $500 (about 150,000 rupees), a student gets six months of training, six of incubation, and six of grocery support — the groceries deliberately included so the student can leave a menial job to study, with the next month’s groceries tied to attendance and results. The bet: one young person earning a few hundred dollars a month lifts an entire family out of poverty.

Selling sustainability where capitalism usually won’t

Muzamil presses on the two hard questions: incentives and survival. Most donors, he notes, just want the obligation off their chest — and charity tech has lagged precisely because the capitalist incentive and sustainability models don’t naturally exist.

On incentives, Kanwal describes impact credits: every donation earns credits pegged to gold — one milligram of gold per credit — making the “proof of charity” tangible in a way carbon credits, she argues, are not. A blockchain layer sits on top, and the longer-term play is secondary markets, where large multinationals could buy credits to match their customers’ impact, diverting marketing funds into social causes the way Cisco once matched her own donations.

On sustainability, she contrasts the platform’s economics with the sector’s. An NGO might spend $3 to raise $10, on ads, fundraisers, and fund managers — the cost behind every charity telethon. My Impact Meter takes 0.5 to 0.8 percent for every $10, in exchange for a full fund-management system the NGOs value. It adds a one percent grocery fee, and a fee from schools and training centres who can’t raise their own prices but gain an entirely new revenue stream. None of it touches the donor. She is candid that this isn’t enough yet — more revenue will have to come from the secondary markets, the platform data, and services to the shopkeepers now joining from across the country. The whole thing is bootstrapped on her own money, piloted in Pakistan, impact-first rather than commercial-first, with a global ambition once the model is proven.

Pakistan as a startup that hasn’t found its model

For the closing question, Muzamil asks how she sees Pakistan in 2050. Her answer turns on the demographics. In the old world, economies grew by acquiring land and people through war; that era is gone. Now growth comes from the quality of your people and resources, which are finite. Pakistan’s young population is a vast advantage — or, if its youth aren’t invested in, a vast disadvantage.

Then she reaches, reluctantly, for a metaphor from her new world. Pakistan, she says, is a young democracy where democracy in its true sense hasn’t been able to flourish — still in a state of experimentation, never quite reaching a stable, mature system. “We’re still in that startup model.” A startup spends a long time learning and searching for its business model; only once it finds that model does the money go in and the thing scale. Pakistan, in her reading, still hasn’t found the model it can mature. The sooner it gets out of permanent experimentation and into stability, the sooner it can scale — and that, more than any single policy, is what she’s watching for.