eLIT founder Safia Rizvi defied expectations when she moved to the U.S., earned a Ph.D., and broke off an arranged marriage. Now she’s helping other women overcome barriers.
By Susan Frith | Photography by Bill Cramer
It must have been a bad translation that Safia Rizvi WG’03 came across, as a girl growing up in Karachi, Pakistan, but the book has stuck in her mind all these years later.
“It somehow translated to say that in Paris, the streets are made of glass,” Rizvi recalls, amusement flickering over her dark eyes. “I imagined the shiny glass city streets, and the cars are rolling along on the glass. So I told my siblings I was going to go to Paris one day.” They laughed at her travel fantasy. “From that moment onwards, my siblings had a teasing name for me: Queen of Paris.”
For Rizvi, raised in a patriarchal Muslim household, a much smaller perimeter had been drawn: She would come home from school and cook dinner. She would let her parents and her two brothers make decisions on her behalf. And she would marry someone her family picked out. End of story.
Well, not exactly.
The energetic woman who’s telling this story now over baba ghanoush at the Metropolitan Bakery near Penn’s campus is a Philadelphia resident, a scientist, and a single parent who was named 2001 Working Mother of the Year by Working Mother magazine. She also is founder of Empowerment through Learning Information Technology (eLIT), a non-profit that teaches computer skills to socially and economically disadvantaged women and children. Since eLIT’s creation five years ago (www.elitonline.org), a thousand students have passed through its centers in West Philadelphia, India, and Pakistan.
In addition to improving women’s prospects, Rizvi hopes the eLIT model can be expanded to counter the forces that feed terrorism. “No one is safe until everyone is safe,” she says. “I think we can use communications technology to bring peoples of different cultures, nationalities, and religions closer and really create harmony and understanding.”
With her long dark hair pulled off her heart-shaped face, her ready laugh, and her often self-effacing manner, the adult Rizvi doesn’t fit the standard image of a rebel, and she certainly didn’t see herself that way growing up.
It was a source of family pride that Rizvi, one of five girls, was such a good student. (“Math and science came so naturally,” she says.) But that wasn’t enough to elevate her to the first-class status enjoyed by her brothers. “I never questioned that social order,” she says. “That was just the way things were.”
She majored in chemistry at the University of Karachi, ranking number two in her statewide graduating class. When she went to collect her diploma, one of her professors told her that an American professor was there, interviewing students for scholarships to American graduate schools. “I said, ‘There is no way on earth my parents are going to let me go abroad to study alone.’” He begged her to sit for an interview anyway, wanting to impress the professor with the university’s top students.
Afterward Rizvi quietly filled out some applications and mailed them. “I didn’t know what would happen. I had never lived outside my home. At that point I don’t think I had ever slept in a room by myself.” When she started to receive offers, including one from the University of Oklahoma, her family’s first reaction was stunned silence. Then came anger, particularly from her brothers, who didn’t think it was right for a single woman to live away from home.
“My family decided I would go study only if I were married, because then I’m no longer my family’s responsibility as a single unwed woman and it would then be my husband’s decision to let me study or not.”
Two weeks after Rizvi started classes, she got married—over the telephone. A few hundred guests attended her wedding back home. “They had a fancy wedding dinner, the whole nine yards,” she reports with a wry smile. “Just no bride.” Once Rizvi’s new husband joined her in Oklahoma, her fantasies of what marriage would be like quickly faded. “But I am grateful because something wonderful and beautiful came out of that marriage—my daughter.”
After the birth of Maham, who is now 15, Rizvi began to change. “I started to become anchored and more of a woman rather than a scared girl who was just good at school.” Her growing independence didn’t square with her husband’s views on how she should act and she didn’t want her own daughter to grow up with the restrictions she had known.
The couple separated, and eventually divorced. “I felt that if I worked hard, I can get my Ph.D. and provide my daughter a safe, happy, and nurturing home,” she says. Her decision to raise Maham on her own was “unthinkable for my upbringing, [but] I knew no matter how hard I worked that I could not make my marriage work in a way that was respectable to me.” Her family didn’t understand. “My father told me, ‘If you’re not married to this man, my son-in-law, you’re not my daughter.’”
As painful and scary as it was to be cut off from most of her family, Rizvi managed to cultivate her own “amazing support system” in Oklahoma. Her friends were graduate students and post-docs from Ghana, China, Sri Lanka, and Uganda. They were the parents of a law-school friend. A diverse extended family, who gathered with her on holidays, and who babysat while she worked late in the lab.
“My daughter grew up totally color blind,” Rizvi says. “A black woman with curly hair was Auntie Gertrude and a white Southern Baptist couple were Grandma and Grandpa.” The experience “opened my eyes, and I cannot ignore the fact that at the base of everything is human relation, devoid of other superficial strings.”
Though Rizvi didn’t lack for friendship, sleep was scarce. “I don’t think I’ve ever worked that hard in my life,” she recalls. She would work all day while Maham was in daycare, bring her home, put her to bed, and leave for the lab—often until 1 or 2 a.m. Rizvi sometimes traded cooking for babysitting with friends. Other times, she says, “I would carry Maham with her bedding and she would sleep in the lab while I worked on experiments.”
A post-doc brought Rizvi to Penn’s School of Medicine in 1995. She has stayed in Philadelphia since then, working for GlaxoSmithKline—first as a cancer researcher working on human genome data, and now, with the help of a Wharton MBA, as manager of the company’s achievement and corporate excellence group.
One day she happened to attend a talk in New York by Asma Jahangir, a Pakistani women’s rights activist. “She was talking about cases of abuse and how they end up in the justice system at the mercy of very gender-skewed judicial standards. I looked at my life and thought, ‘I could have been one of those women.’ Instead, I was sitting here with a Ph.D. in chemistry, full custody of my daughter, and a job I enjoyed. It just turned something in my head about how privileged my existence is. I knew the choices I made were alien to millions of women in my corner and other parts of the world. I was able to make those choices simply because of my education and economic independence.”
Rizvi started thinking about how she could use computer technology to create more opportunities for other women, and this was the seed from which eLIT grew.
It was slow going at first. Rizvi recalls an information-technology conference she attended on Capitol Hill at the height of the dot.com boom, where “no one was willing to look at this proposal as a viable, socially responsible investment in any sense.” But she persevered, gradually gathering a group of eight people she knew through work or her daughter’s school and convincing each of them to join her effort.
Pia Neman, eLIT’s treasurer and a neighbor in Rizvi’s apartment complex, says, “I didn’t really realize how ambitious of an idea it was until after I’d gone to a couple of meetings and she started going around to people and asking for donations.” (Among the organizations that donated computers were Penn’s Center for Community Partnerships, the Wharton Marketing Group, and Rizvi’s own company.) “I tease her that nobody ever says No to her,” Neman says. “She says that’s because eLIT is such a good idea. But we all know there are a million good ideas out there, and they don’t all get that far off the ground. She’s also very demanding of herself. She’s tremendously dedicated and energetic.”
Today eLIT operates centers in West Philadelphia; Hyderabad, India; and Mansehra and Karachi, Pakistan. The facilities are typically modest: In Karachi, for example, classes are offered to children by day and to neighborhood women by night in a one-room computer lab at a small girls’ school.
Using these sites keeps down costs, Rizvi explains. For about $4,500 to $5,000, eLIT can run a center serving 200 to 300 women and children for an entire year.
David Babu, who directs the eLIT center in a working-class district on the outskirts of Hyderabad, describes the unique niche it fills: “There is no such computer-training center in this vicinity. But the people have the desire to learn basic computer skills, as they are very much needed in the society in order to secure jobs. At the other training centers, they charge them quite a bit of money, which these women and children can’t afford to pay due to their financial constraints.”
“We have some remarkable success stories,” says Rizvi. In Hyderabad, one eLIT graduate got a data-entry job at a local newspaper archive. “Her salary is now roughly $60 a month, or 3,000 rupees, and her family economics has completely changed because of the job she has.” She told a visitor to the center that she can have a “better Holi,” referring to a Hindu festival for which people buy colorful powders to smear on each other, new clothes for their families to wear, and special food. “When she was poor she couldn’t afford such things.”
M. Lakshmi, another graduate who now teaches at the center while pursuing a college degree in the sciences, wrote that, “I had little knowledge of computers before I came to eLIT.” Now she’s fluent in the language of Microsoft. “I have learnt to use the PowerPoint in company presentations and how to make use of the spreadsheets. I am in a position to use my computer skills outside the center.” She calls eLIT “a good training center,” adding that she would like to see it offer “new courses and computer programs besides teaching the basic computer skills.”
In the Philadelphia center, Rizvi says, “I can see the physical change in the way women sit and touch the computer mouse. Before they’re touching everything with the fear it might break. Three months later, you see the same women, sitting with their shoulders straight, designing a card on PowerPoint or writing a Word document.” With these new skills comes new confidence.
Reflecting the cultures and economic circumstances in which they’re immersed, the centers have used different tactics to attract and keep students. In India and Pakistan they hire only women teachers to make families feel more comfortable sending their daughters to classes and to help the students themselves feel less inhibited.
The Philadelphia eLIT center has had to do much more recruiting—followed by home or shelter visits to keep students coming back. In contrast, there’s a long waiting list in Pakistan and India, where “three or four women share one computer just to look over each other’s shoulders. They have such a hunger for any kind of educational or economic resources,” Rizvi says. Contrasting the levels of government help available, she adds, “If somebody doesn’t earn income by the time evening comes along, there’s no safety net, no welfare check coming in from anywhere.”
Another difference is that a higher percentage of graduates from the India center have gotten jobs than those from the Pakistan centers, she says. “Probably Indian society is a little more open toward women seeking employment and improving their economic power.” But jobs outside the home aren’t the only way to measure the organization’s effects. Even if these women are simply using their new skills to help their children do their homework, that’s a positive step, she says.
“In my culture there’s a proverb: when you educate a man, you’ve educated one person, but when you educate a woman, you educate 19 persons,” Rizvi says. “It started out alluding to women being talkers, but the reality is that they share information. They share it with their children, their neighbors, their friends, their grandchildren. If the mother is informed, she’s going to raise children who are informed and more open to ideas. Having learned what I did at Wharton, I say investing in the education of women [yields] a better return on investment.”
Simply having email and Internet access can make an immense difference in women’s lives, Rizvi believes. “If I’m sitting in Karachi or Hyderabad and something terrible is happening to me, more often than not I can’t ask for help from my relatives because they are custom- and tradition-bound.”
Three years ago Mukhtar Mai, a teacher in the Punjab province of Pakistan, was sentenced by a local jury to gang rape as punishment for the shame her brother had brought on another family by flirting with one of its female relatives. After being raped, Mai was paraded naked before a village crowd. She took her rapists to court, and her case has drawn international attention as well as thousands of dollars in donations, which she used, in part, to set up a shelter for battered women.
“She is one of many women who suffer such indignities and injustice,” Rizvi is quick to point out, and not all cases get such widespread coverage. But if more women had access to email and the Internet, they could tell their stories.
Another eLIT center was slated to open in Karachi in October. “We’re hoping the new center will have a room for sewing and a room for computers,” Rizvi says. “We want to make it possible for women who make their living by sewing or creating other handicrafts to continue doing what they’re doing and get better at it, to make products that eLIT can place on the Internet, and then to get paid two or three or four times what they otherwise would get paid for their handiwork.” Once these women know how to use computers, they could sell their work online without any middleman, she explains.
Rizvi recently received a package of embroidered goods that one of her sisters had picked up from a potential eLIT student in Karachi. The woman lived in a one-room house with five children. “She’s in her late 30s, and she told my sister that in her entire life she has never had a single good meal,” Rizvi says. “She has always had what was left over and scraped together. And she has never worn new clothes. The hair on my skin stood up and I burst into tears when I heard this. On some level I felt very bad for her lot in life, and on some level I felt very proud of her, that she is not giving up. She is not sitting at the street corner and begging or prostituting herself. Instead, she’s working hard, doing embroidery, to provide for her kids. If we can help [create] an economic outlet and educational opportunity for women like her, that’s what I would like to see happen.”
Lee Shlifer CGS’74, president of the Philadelphia Penn Club, first met Rizvi at an alumni event. “She didn’t want to talk about herself or her accomplishments in life,” he recalls. “But I thought there was something there. So I Googled her name, and all this stuff came up, [like] ‘Working Mother of the Year.’” (Rizvi says she almost turned down the award because she didn’t want to draw attention to herself, but she realized that it would be good publicity for eLIT.)
The next time he saw her, Shlifer confessed to his Internet sleuthing. “She was really embarrassed. She said, ‘In my culture we don’t brag about our accomplishments.’
“Well in our culture we do,” he told her. “I’m a great promoter of people who have something to offer, and you have something to offer.”
Since then, the Philadelphia Penn Club has taken on eLIT as a community-service project, and Shlifer and Rizvi are trying to convince alumni clubs in other major cities—as well as the University itself—to do the same. “I can visualize eLIT centers sponsored by different Penn clubs all over the world,” Shlifer says. “The budget is minimal, and the University would get all this recognition for doing this.”
Shlifer says he’s seen people moved to tears when Rizvi speaks to alumni groups about her goals for eLIT and for women who haven’t had the opportunity to fully develop their talents. “When she makes her presentation, if you don’t feel it in your gut, you’re not alive.”
Rizvi says she would love to see Penn alumni take their “education, skills, and a message of democracy” to all parts of the globe through a network of alumni-supported technology centers. “This would be an enormous contribution toward bringing the future generations of this world together.”
As a scientist, Rizvi can’t help but think of terrorism as the symptom of a bigger disease, “which is ignorance or intolerance” fed by poverty and a lack of access to education and information. “I see no better drug to treat this disease than education. If you can stop [the gene] from expressing, you can kill the disease from its very roots.”
Ultimately she would like to build upon the success of eLIT to reform madrassas, turning Islamic schools where hatred toward Westerners is often taught into technology centers. “Most families who send their young boys to madrassas do so because they’re poor and the schools provide food and clothing as well as a sense of respectability,” Rizvi says. “From early childhood they learn that anyone who doesn’t believe in their brand of Islam is an infidel and it is their duty to eliminate the world of the infidel. It’s not really their fault because they’re brainwashed.” If these students have had any exposure to Western popular culture, “they think that every man from the West is a James Bond, and every woman is walking around in a bikini and seducing men.”
What if these children were instead learning digital editing, word-processing and other marketable computer skills, Rizvi wonders. What if they went online to research what life is actually like in other countries, get advice from mentors in various professions, and take part in moderated chat rooms with students from different cultures? If the clerics who run these schools didn’t cooperate, technology centers could be set up at alternative sites to compete with the madrassas.
Whatever it would cost to create a network of such schools in places like Afghanistan or Iraq, Rizvi says, “It would still be only a fraction of what it takes to bomb countries. These children can be attracted if we provide food and clothing, and hope for a future.”
She shared this idea with President Bush a few years ago when she was invited to the White House with a group of Pakistani-Americans to talk about U.S. policy in South Asia. The invitation came just months after September 11, and Rizvi spoke bluntly. “While we’re dropping bombs and doing all these things as a way of eliminating terrorism, I believe those are short-term solutions,” she told the President. “What those things do is make one place safe for a short while and make the rest of the world even more dangerous.”
Rizvi has not heard back from Bush on her proposal, but she hopes to grow her organization enough to support one technology center at a time.
Meanwhile, she has other ideas for dousing extremism. In July she spoke to the Islamic Foundation of Villanova about how electronic literacy can increase women’s participation in societies where they face cultural and religious restrictions.
“It provides women ‘virtual purdah,’ Rizvi says. (Purdah literally means curtain but is used for different forms of covering of women.) “If a woman is sitting at home and her parents, husband, or brother do not allow her to attend a meeting regarding any kind of social issue, she has the ability to send her view or interact in different ways through electronic media. I think it has a very unique benefit for women”—and for those societies, by adding other viewpoints to the mix.
It is partly her own experience as a grad student, finding fellowship among people so different from her, that fuels Rizvi’s desire for a world less divided by national or religious boundaries. “It’s very idealistic, but I don’t feel it’s impossible,” she says. “If 18 years back I said I would have a Ph.D. and an MBA, and I would be doing this, everyone would have thought I was crazy.” (The Queen of Paris did eventually make it to Paris, by the way. On a brief visit with friends who lived there, Rizvi was “very disappointed there were no streets of glass and no cars running on glass streets.”)
Her work with eLIT also takes her back to Pakistan occasionally. “It’s a very different feeling,” she says. “I left as a kid, emotionally sheltered and naïve. I didn’t know the world at all. And now I’m a grown woman. I think my age, my education, and the work I’ve done have lent me a credibility that’s very helpful when I go there now.”
Rizvi’s own parents, who now live in Toronto, have come around as well. While they still can’t comprehend “that a woman can live on her own and be fine,” she says, they “accept my life’s choices.”
“My father visited the other week,” Rizvi says. “He was sick. I think it’s the first time in my entire life I had a heart-to-heart conversation with my father. We actually discussed things and I felt my opinions were valued.”
As close as she is to her own daughter, Rizvi happily accepts the fact that Maham has different dreams and interests. “I loved subjects like algebra and chemistry, and she finds history and literature, and art and acting very interesting. I learn a lot from her. She’s a great kid.” Rizvi wants the future to look as bright for other young women.
One of her favorite stories is of an eLIT graduate in India who got a job with a multinational firm because she could use the computer. “This girl comes back and says, ‘I’m going to go to college and one day I’m going to be managing director of that company.’
“I felt so happy when I heard this story,” says Rizvi. “To me this is empowerment: being able to feel you can achieve anything you set your mind to. That is the sort of feeling I wish every woman could feel. It’s a gift that’s beyond any words.”