Our story
How Peace Through Prosperity got here
Peace Through Prosperity began in 2011, asking street cobblers in Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa what actually held their trade back. The survey was published in July 2012 and the first Business Growth Workshop ran in Rawalpindi that November. The same method has since reached more than 4,000 micro-entrepreneurs and young community leaders across seven countries.
Nothing here was designed in advance. Each version of the programme was built on what the last cohort showed us, written down at the time, and published for anyone to take. This page is the record, with the documents and the coverage that go with it.
The arc
How the work got here
The street cobblers
The work started by asking cobblers in Rawalpindi, Chichawatni, Haripur and Darra Adam Khel what actually held their trade back. Four hundred and forty-four were surveyed, and most of them had come from Bajaur in the tribal areas. The forty-five page report came out in July 2012 and the first Business Growth Workshop ran in Rawalpindi that November.
The programme proper
The first workshop ran in Rawalpindi in November 2012, and the programme spread out from there: Haripur in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, then the towns of southern Punjab, cohort after cohort, each one logged as it happened. The Business Growth Manual was rewritten between cohorts and the format settled into consecutive short days rather than a single long one.
Going deep in Karachi
The work stopped spreading outward and went deeper instead, settling into Karachi: seven communities and 1,498 individuals reached, cohort after cohort in the same neighbourhoods. Alumni businesses were tracked rather than counted once and forgotten.
Marking our own homework
Empathy mapping moved out of the classroom and onto the street in Hijrat Colony. A four-year retrospective, published February 2017, set out what had worked and what had not.
Beyond Karachi
In winter 2018 came the chance to put the same method to work somewhere harder. Yemen launched formally in summer 2019 and ran in nine cities, from Sanaa and Aden to Taiz and Dhamar. In November 2021 it opened in Cairo, another mega-city, when a trainer from the Yemen chapter relocated there. Same programme, same micro-entrepreneurs, different streets. Cohorts continued in Ibrahim Hyderi in Karachi throughout, including women-only groups.
A second programme
Numu takes the same method to young people rather than traders: Izmir, Amman, Baqa’a refugee camp and Luanda. The coaching commitment shortened from six months to three. It is not finished. Numu is still growing, and where it goes next has not been written yet.
The cohort-by-cohort listing for 2019 to 2023 is on past programmes, and the account written as it happened is in the blog, which begins in July 2012 with the survey the whole programme was built on.
What it added up to
Counted, not asserted
Participants report their revenue and profit before the programme and through the coaching months afterwards. Across cohorts that gives an average of 45% revenue growth and 97% profitability growth, alongside 320 or more jobs created and around 26,000 indirect beneficiaries across 32 marginalised communities.
The figures, and what sits behind them, are on the impact page. The method that produced them is on our approach.
Written down at the time
The documents
Every programme is published in full once it has been validated, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licence. Take them, translate them, run them — just do not charge the people you run them with.
- Street Cobbler Survey Report, July 2012 — 45 pages. The baseline research the whole programme was built on: 444 cobblers engaged across four towns, 438 usable responses.
- Business Growth Manual v4.0, 2017 — 77 pages. The full mini-MBA training manual, taught in Urdu, Arabic and English.
- A Four-Year Retrospective, February 2017 — 17 pages. What had worked by then, and what had not.
- mini-MBA and Consulting Concept Paper v1.0 — 10 pages. How the programme is designed and why.
- 2023 Annual Report from Pakistan — over a decade of the work, reported from the field.
Written up elsewhere
Where the work has been published
Cutter Business Technology Journal
Pathway to Prosperity: Using Mobius to Grow Micro-Entrepreneurship — Gabrielle Benefield and Kubair Shirazee, April 2019. The long-form account of how the method was assembled, in the Cutter Business Technology Journal.
Management 3.0
Agile’s answer to extremism and terrorism — the argument for why livelihood security and peace building belong in the same sentence.
South Asia Magazine
Poverty is one of the major reasons behind our social degradation — a Social Initiative interview with co-founder Kubair Shirazee, June 2014.
The Grassroots Playbook
Seventeen validated community projects for teams of three to five with no budget, 37 pages, free in six languages. Written by our co-founder and produced in partnership with Peace Through Prosperity: get the playbook.
The programme has also been covered by local newspapers in the communities it runs in. Those clippings, and a note for journalists, are on the press page.
Where it runs now
Seven countries, and room for more
There are chapters in Pakistan, Yemen, Egypt, Tanzania, Türkiye, Jordan and Angola. The mini-MBA continues for micro-entrepreneurs; Numu takes the same thinking to young people running change projects where they live. None of it is grant-funded, which is why it has never grown faster than we can coach.