September 18, 2026
By Luluwa Lokandwala
GILGIT
Nearly an hour away from Gilgit City, in the heart of the mountains, a small school thrives, and within this small space, an even tinier space stands out where books rule the world.
This is the Government Girls’ High School, in Chalt Valley, located in District Bala Nagar. In a place where life is busy, the quiet sanctuary that the modest library offers is one of a kind.
“Once you learn to read, you will forever be free,” says a sign placed above the door. And freedom is what it seems to be giving the girls here. It can be seen even when summer holidays are in full swing: Students arrive regularly to their school just to visit the library. They play and read in the garden, plucking cherries from the orchard outside the school.
The library is an initiative of ‘Mountain Reads’, a non profit organization, formed by siblings Subtain Abbas and Sabeen Fatima, inspired by Subtain’s love for libraries. It is operational not just in summer holidays, but even after school hours, with the gatekeeper usually close by carefully guarding the building. Even the school teachers live only a short distance away.
A different world, promising dreams
Inside, the shelves are stocked with a small, but smart selection of children’s books, including English and Urdu story books, and religious literature. Even with a small selection, this library provides a rare haven for the girls in this area, who otherwise must tend to their domestic and agricultural chores.
The girls who find respite in this library have big dreams. Some want to get out of the lives they lead here, and travel to the cities to study.
“I want to become a doctor,” says one of the students, who was working in the cherry fields outside the school on the weekend. Her eyes shine bright as she thinks of the possibility of this future.
Mountain Reads: Helping students climb
Sabeen Fatima, the founder of Mountain Reads, is dedicated to expanding the students’ horizons by establishing even more libraries. She wants for them to first find an escape from their mundane lives through books, and then eventually in real life too. This is also why she has thought of bringing in more digital access to the children.
The region is fairly inaccessible, so Sabeen understands that the only way to bring the world to them in this remote village is through the computer and the internet.
“I really hope someday we can build digital libraries in Gilgit-Baltistan and educate girls on digital skills,” she says.
So far, Mountain Reads has built two complete libraries in Chalt and Chaprote villages of Gilgit-Baltistan, with one more under development in the area. It is dedicated to equipping educational institutes with scarce resources in remote areas of Gilgit-Baltistan and building small libraries for them. It collaborates with existing government schools and NGOs in the region and builds safe spaces for girls and women, as they have little to no access to “third spaces” in their villages where they can meet, learn and socialise. In that case then the library functions as a reading and community space.
Excluded from the digital world
In northern Pakistan, digital inclusion is often seen as a question of accessibility to online learning. But girls in remote villages grapple with other things even before this question of accessibility. They must deal with unreliable electricity, lack of internet signals, and the unavailability of safe spaces to learn. Now, as local women have begun to educate themselves, they also want to uplift the people around them through digital-learning initiatives.
What these women reveal is how the access to technology primarily depends on the presence of basic infrastructure, and also why this divide deepens existing inequalities in the social fabric of Pakistan.
Digital building in Chalt Valley High School
Sabeen leads the way to the computer lab in the school and explains why building a digital library is a big challenge.
The high school’s IT Lab has more than 15 computers – PCs and a solar battery system to run it, funded by the GB government as part of their “50 makers spaces” initiative. The initiative promised there would also be ‘buddy bot’, a 3D printer and a STEAM Box, among others – but none of these can be found here.
The existence of a computer lab is also not as exciting when it becomes apparent that the village gets only around six hours of electricity everyday, which means it is mostly reliant on the solar panels installed by the people themselves. As for the internet, it is non-existent in this particular area. The school has a computer studies curriculum like the rest of the country; but because of the lack of internet, the IT education of the girls in this school is limited to the old version of Microsoft Suite – that too if electricity is available. Otherwise, it is simply rote learning from school books.
Finding the funding
Bibi Hamza, a young changemaker from northern Pakistan, has faced similar issues in her home region of Chitral.
In 2024, Bibi Hamza received seed funding from her fellowship in The Aspire Leaders Program founded at Harvard University, where she had proposed building a small computer lab in her local community-run school in Karimabad. The funding she got was enough to install just three PCs. However, soon, she realised that the issue of electricity and no access made this digital literacy program very difficult to execute.
The issue remains that despite the grand dreams of providing digital education, the work starts way before even one computer system comes into the picture. It starts with the most basic infrastructure needs – with electricity.
While the River Indus rushes through the valleys of Gilgit-Baltistan, the hydropower generated on it gets rerouted to other provinces for their electricity and internet. Most of the northern region suffers from a lack of internet, and in areas that do have some signals, they mostly rely heavily on the state-backed Special Communication Organisation (SCOM). However it is far from reliable. It is ironic that while Sindh and Punjab are celebrating the arrival of 5G, the rest of the country suffers without basic connectivity.
Terrain determines difficulty
Due to the mountainous geography of the northern region, any kind of development becomes doubly challenging.
A recent report by the Universal Service Fund (USF) investigated issues that halt the development of internet services in Upper and Lower Chitral and also found that the terrain remains one of the biggest obstacles and that many Base Transceiver Station (BTS) sites are located on high-altitude mountains that are difficult to reach because of a lack of proper roads, making maintenance and repairs difficult and time-consuming. On top of that, much of northern Pakistan is a disputed territory. Gilgit-Baltistan currently operates as a separate administrative territory rather than a full constitutional province. This already makes their development a low priority for the Federal Government.
Adnan Ali, an Alumni Engagement Manager at the Aspire Leaders Program who had worked with Bibi Hamza’s cohort, also hails from the Chitral region, from a small village, Madaklasht. He shared the same frustrations from his time as a young student in the region. He shared that he did not want the students today to face the same setbacks as he did and decided to start a digital library initiative called Khana-e-Khiyali with Madaklasht Student Organisation (MSO).
Adnan has also faced similar challenges as Sabeen, but he noticed one thing: the use of WhatsApp messaging service increasing among the youth. MSO’s digital library was an archive of digitised books uploaded to Google Drive, which could be easily shared through messages. However, Adnan noted that it was not an easy feat to pull off since the region gets no signals during the winter months, completely disconnecting them for 4-6 months every year. However, he was happy to see the positive engagement this project resulted in, as students would engage in discussions on books instead of falling for the wiles of smartphones.
Hamza also shared that the misuse of smartphones is quite common because girls are not educated in the proper use of these devices. She was the first girl in her village to graduate with a degree in Computer Science. She used her expertise to train girls in her new computer lab in basic skills such as the MS Office suite. Soon she realised that the training had to go beyond the computer, because girls would benefit more from learning how to use a smartphone responsibly, since they were much more accessible to them. She later also designed a course with Circle Women on digital literacy. She trained a few cohorts of young girls where she taught them responsible use of smartphones, how to protect their social media accounts, make safe passwords, and even how to use tools like digital maps!
She recalled a particular story when one of her students had to travel to another city, navigating her route on digital maps. She realised that her rickshaw was taking her off route, and she managed to escape the dangerous situation. Hamza noted that as girls were also trained in responsible use of social media, they were able to set up accounts for their small businesses and successfully operate them.
Sabeen, who has grown up and lived most of her life in Karachi, understands the urgency of having internet infrastructure when it comes to education and employment opportunities. She works with an NGO based in Karachi and often has a lot of trouble connecting online for her work. “I live in Gilgit city, the biggest city of Gilgit-Baltistan; even then, the internet is unreliable. When I’m on the field for research or when I go to my village, I just cannot take any meetings or work properly. Often for important meetings, I have to travel back to the city to get access to the internet,” shares Sabeen. She has established Mountain Reads herself with support from her family and friends, and as she started to apply for funds to build this project, it was a big challenge for her to communicate with the donors because of connectivity issues.
Sabeen’s village in Chaprote also tells a similar story. The library built in a school behind her family home also has no access to the internet. The girls simply have to fill their appetites with the government-set syllabus, and now find relief in the small library set up by Mountain Reads. However, girls in these tiny villages do not stop dreaming. Sabeen’s cousin is currently pursuing her bachelor’s degree from Karakoram National University. Her aunt is a professor in a college in Gilgit City and encourages Sabeen constantly to pursue her career with passion.
However, not all women are as lucky when it comes to family support, resources and exposure. Sabeen’s time in Karachi really sharpened her drive to continue her education and excel in her career. But for girls who have not seen life outside small, remote village, the rest of the world doesn’t seem so accessible. Today, when there is debate on how smartphones are corrupting young minds, most people in Gilgit Baltistan have barely any exposure to the internet to experience the good things that it offers, such as increased economic and educational prospects.
Aga Khan Rural Support Program has proven time and time again that developing Gilgit Baltistan through investing in women will benefit the whole country. In 2007, they piloted women-only markets. By 2025, the number grew to 30 women-only markets spread across the following regions: Baltistan Division 21 (Skardu 15, Shigar two, Ghanche four), Gilgit five (Gilgit two, Ghizer two, Hunza one), four in Chitral (three in Upper Chitral and one in Lower Chitral districts). The markets had electricity and affordable rents and were established near schools, hospitals, or busy community centres for accessibility.
However, upliftment of women through tech education is barely the government’s priority beyond optics. In the 2025-2026 budget of Gilgit-Baltistan, less than 1% of the budget was allocated to education; this also reflects the federal government’s priority of education. In 2025, the government only spent 0.8% of its GDP on education. In 2026, the education budget only increased by 4.5% from the previous year; meanwhile, the military budget increased by a whopping 16%. When the overall budget for education is so low that it cannot even cover the resources needed to provide education for all children at the primary level in Pakistan, a focus on girls and tech is a long shot.
A distant dream
For the girls in Chalt, Chaprote and the villages of Chitral, digital inclusion is still a distant promise. But even before they can get help from online education, they need something more basic, that is, reliable electricity, and safe spaces where they can learn safely.
The girls are navigating a system in which geography, infrastructure and limited resources determine how far their ambitions can travel.
For now, their dreams to become doctors, pursue degrees, build businesses and travel beyond their villages continue to hang in mid sir.
This story was produced with the support of Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD)’s Media Fellowship on Digitalisation and Feminist Digital Rights and Justice.