In Pakistan, like everywhere in the world, women’s health is treated like an afterthought. It is ignored by budgets, buried under stigma, and wheeled out only for glossy, pink PR campaigns led by men in boardrooms without a single woman at the table.
At the same time, maternal mortality remains stubbornly high. Periods are treated as shameful interruptions. Cervical cancer, which can easily be caught early, is still the third most common cancer in the country.
There is every reason to be horrified — the prognosis for women’s health in Pakistan is bleak. After years of accumulating unnecessary death tolls and losing ground to misplaced public health priorities, many women have stopped waiting to be rescued. Across the country, they are taking matters into their own hands. Entrepreneurs are building homegrown solutions, designed by Pakistani women for Pakistani women — innovations forged from lived experience and sharpened against the cultural and systemic barriers that define their reality.
The superwoman
When Sadaf Altaf was a young girl, she learned the unspoken rule: don’t talk too much about periods. The topic was soaked in shame before she even understood what it meant. It’s a story far too many of us share. Sanitary pads are still being handed over in brown paper bags, and schoolgirls continue to miss classes, caught between their own unpreparedness and schools unequipped to support them. Surveys reveal the scale of this silence: nearly half of Pakistani girls had no idea what was happening when their first period arrived, and 79pc women admit they don’t even want to talk about it.
Altaf’s answer to that silence was Superwomen.pk, an e-commerce platform built around education and advocacy. One of its most striking initiatives is Pakistan’s first period comic book, tracing a girl’s journey from childhood to menopause — turning what was once a hushed subject into a story told openly. Alongside it, Superwomen runs awareness sessions in schools and offices, weaving menstrual health into everyday conversation instead of leaving it buried in embarrassment.
Her work has also meant showing up in moments of crisis. During the 2022 floods, when millions were displaced, Altaf and her team distributed thousands of sanitary pads and cotton underwear in relief camps — items rarely included in official aid lists but essential for women’s health and dignity.
For Altaf, the mission is clear: to pull menstruation out of the shadows and place it firmly alongside any other health concern. “This is my work. I need to do this,” she says, undeterred by the criticism she continues to face from friends and family.
Building local
For Madeeha Malik, the shock came in her own ancestral village. When she asked local women what they used during their periods, one replied that she relied on cow dung.
At the time, Malik was a professor of pharmacy. She resigned, emptied her savings, and set out to build what would become Fempure. Today, the company produces biodegradable sanitary pads on locally engineered machines, distributes reusable kits, and certifies workplaces as “period positive.” Its accompanying app offers education, menstrual disorder screening, and discreet product delivery.
Only 17pc of Pakistani women have access to sanitary napkins, while counterfeit and poor-quality products flood the market. Even genuine pads are still taxed as luxury items. For Malik, though, the goal was never just to put another product on the shelf. “We wanted to go from root to stem — from product quality to stigma to policy,” she said.
Bringing the test home
Menstrual health is not the only area where women are left to improvise. The same neglect is visible in how Pakistan handles diseases that are easily prevented elsewhere. Cervical cancer, for instance, is rarely fatal in countries where pap smears and the HPV vaccine are routine.
CerviTest was born out of the recognition that Pakistan needed a different approach to cervical cancer prevention. The logic is simple: if cultural barriers prevent women from visiting hospitals, the test should be brought to their homes. The kit can be collected from a pharmacy, used in private, and returned for results delivered discreetly by text.
It is not without roadblocks — rural logistics, low literacy, and strained lab capacity all pose challenges. But co-founders Bushra Zafar and Nadia Kellman argue it is a step Pakistan cannot afford to delay. “In the West, home testing is about convenience,” Kellman said. “Here, it is about life or death.”
Supporting pregnant women
When the system looks away, it is women who are left to pick up the pieces — whether it’s a late-stage diagnosis or the fog of postpartum. Goud emerged as a response to unspoken struggles of motherhood. For co-founder Ummam Baig, pregnancy itself was manageable; it was the weeks after birth that left her reeling. Postpartum depression, breastfeeding struggles, and family pressures left her feeling invisible.
Consequently, she and her co-founder Meesha Baig decided to build what was missing: a pregnancy tracker and postpartum support app tailored to Pakistan. Unlike global apps that assume nuclear families and Western lifestyles, Goud speaks to the reality of joint households, cultural taboos, and the absence of structured maternity leave.
Its WhatsApp circles connect women navigating the same stage of pregnancy or motherhood. They trade advice, vent frustrations, and validate one another’s struggles. One woman called the support “finding heaven.” Another credited the app with saving her marriage.
The model is simple: medically vetted advice, delivered with cultural sensitivity. But what it truly offers is rarer — solidarity and information in a country where both are in short supply.
Smashing the glass ceiling
What binds Superwomen, Fempure, CerviTest, and Goud is urgency. Each venture carries the imprint of lived struggle, the determination to turn personal scars into collective solutions. For years, such efforts existed in silos, each fighting for breath in a system stacked against them.
The Femtech Innovation Hub, built by the Center for Economic Research in Pakistan (CERP) with LUMS and backed by the Gates Foundation, has begun to change that story. By bringing 35 women’s health startups into a single cohort, it has unlocked mentors, pilot projects with hospitals and NGOs, and provides crucial access to policymakers. It is early work but what were once isolated fixes are now converging into a movement — one that urges entrepreneurs to think bigger and tackle problems long considered untouchable.
By meeting needs that budgets overlook and stigma suppresses, these founders are making a radical claim: women’s health is not a side note to public health, but its foundation. In Pakistan, where a woman’s body has too often been cast as a burden, they are reframing it as the country’s greatest chance at healing itself.
Header Image: The image is created via generative AI.
