Founded by Manaal Khalid in 2025
A project by Manaal Khalid. Project Umeed was founded in 2025 by Manaal Khalid to turn storytelling into solidarity — beginning with the Her Choices simulation and dignity kits for women and girls worldwide.
Featured Experience
An immersive, classroom-safe simulation where every decision reveals how education, health and opportunity shape a life. No score. No faces. Just perspective.
The Mission
Umeed means hope. We build the conditions in which hope is reasonable.
Understand
Meet a life before you meet a statistic. Simulation, story and context replace the summary paragraph.
Reflect
Sit with what changed. Reflection turns a visit into a perspective you can carry into a classroom or a conversation.
Act
Pack a kit, run a drive, found a chapter. Understanding that never becomes action is only entertainment.
What We Do
Understanding is where change begins — but it cannot be where change ends. Each of our four programmes moves a visitor one step further from awareness toward action.
With help from her family, Manaal created more than 500 sanitary packs containing toilet paper, various pads, underwear, hand sanitiser and cleansing wipes. They were distributed to girls and women in Orangi Town, Karachi, and to women employed as domestic workers in Saudi Arabia. Dignity is not a luxury item — it is a precondition for health, confidence and opportunity.
500+
Packs distributed
2
Countries reached
Statistics inform; stories change people. Our flagship simulation, Her Choices, invites visitors to step into a life shaped by access to education, healthcare, family expectation and opportunity. Every branch is researched, reviewed and written to honour resilience rather than spectacle — the aim is empathy that survives the closing of the browser tab.
1
Flagship simulation
12
Decision pathways
4,200+
Simulation visits
Our learning library translates dense research into readable, classroom-ready material: beginner research summaries, myth-versus-fact quizzes, interactive timelines and downloadable lesson packs. Everything is sourced, context-aware and written for students who want to understand a subject rather than merely repeat a headline.
24
Published resources
6
Classroom packs
3
Interactive timelines
Umeed is youth-led by design. Students can run a supply drive in a single lunch hour, co-author a research summary over a weekend, or found a chapter that outlives their graduation. We provide the toolkit, the templates and the mentoring; the initiative belongs to the student.
60+
Active volunteers
5
Student chapters
1,150
Volunteer hours
Featured Experience — Flagship Exhibit
Her Choices is an immersive educational simulation that allows users to step into the life of a young woman facing difficult decisions shaped by access to education, freedom, healthcare, family expectations, opportunity and social pressure. It is the cornerstone project of Project Umeed — an exhibit, not a game.
20 min
Average visit
12
Pathways
Ages 13+
Classroom safe
Preview Gallery
Artwork from the simulation: silhouettes, journal pages, interior scenes and the branching structures that shape each visit. No faces — only the objects and shadows a life leaves behind.
Chapter II — The window seat
A morning in which the choice is whether to leave for school at all.
Journal fragment
Between chapters, players read her handwriting rather than a scoreboard.
The gift
A branch that turns on a single act of quiet solidarity.
Epilogue — Horizon
Every pathway ends with reflection, not a score.
Why Interactive Storytelling Matters
Immersive experiences can create empathy and understanding more effectively than statistics alone — because they ask something of the visitor.
A number tells you that something is true. A narrative makes you responsible for having learned it. Immersive experiences hold attention long enough for understanding to become memory.
When a visitor must decide — school or wages, silence or speech — they feel the weight of constraint rather than reading about it. Agency reveals the limits placed on someone else's agency.
Research on narrative transportation suggests that perspective-taking through story improves both retention and prosocial behaviour. We design for the week after, not the moment.
Experience Her World
Project Umeed helps visitors understand women's experiences through interactive storytelling and simulation. These are empathy-building educational experiences, not games — and they are built around resilience, courage, hope and human dignity rather than victimhood.
Story map
Chapter I
A morning begins. The visitor learns the shape of a day before they are asked to change it.
1Chapter II
Options appear — and quietly disappear. Access to school, health and money narrows the branch.
2Chapter III
A choice is made. No option is scored as correct; each carries consequence and dignity.
3Chapter IV
The experience closes with context, sources and a question: what would you do next, here?
4Branching choices
Every pathway is reviewed for accuracy and dignity. No branch is presented as a moral failure, and no character exists to be pitied.
Coming experiences
Education, healthcare, family expectation and opportunity, told through one young woman's branching day.
An experience about distance — to a classroom, to a clinic, to safety — and the hours it costs.
Economic participation, unpaid labour and the arithmetic of a household budget.
The Umeed Atlas
Explore education, health, economic participation and equality indicators by region. We do not score countries or reduce complex histories to a league table — we offer context, progress and the people leading it.
Hover or tap a marker to read its card
Region
A region of rapid educational expansion alongside persistent gaps in health access and economic participation.
ProgressFemale literacy in the region has more than doubled since 1990.
Notable leadershipCommunity health workers who have reshaped rural maternal care.
Local organisationsLocal school-retention collectives and menstrual health networks.
A century of movement
1948
Equal rights affirmed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
1979
CEDAW adopted — a global framework for women's rights.
1995
The Beijing Platform sets a shared agenda for education and health.
2015
Gender equality named a standalone global development goal.
Today
Youth-led movements reframe dignity, data and storytelling.
Stories & Voices
Written stories, interviews, essays, reflections and artwork from women and girls around the world. No identifiable faces appear anywhere on this platform — only silhouettes, objects and the words themselves.
Education — Essay
“I counted the walk in songs. Eleven songs there, eleven back, and a book in between.”
Rural highlands
Family — Reflection
“She could not read the form. She signed it anyway, so that I would learn to.”
Coastal town
Leadership — Interview
“There was no chair for me at the table, so I brought one in from the corridor.”
Capital district
Health — Reflection
“Once a month the classroom lost me. A small box changed the arithmetic of my year.”
Market district
Identity — Poetry
“Daughter, student, translator, eldest. I am learning to add my own name to the list.”
Border city
Opportunity — Essay
“Eighteen women vouched for me. The bank called it collateral; we called it belief.”
River delta
Resilience — Artwork & text
“We rebuilt the school first. Everything else could wait, and everything else did.”
Lowland province
Education — Interview
“My teacher kept a chalk stub in her pocket like a promise she intended to keep.”
Mountain village
Submission Portal
Share a story, essay, poem, reflection or piece of artwork. Submissions are reviewed by our editorial volunteers, published only with consent, and may be shared anonymously or under a pen name. We never request or publish photographs of faces.
Dignity In Action
When hygiene products are unaffordable or unavailable, girls miss school, women miss work, and health risks rise. A kit costs very little and returns days, confidence and health to someone's year.
Build a virtual dignity kit
Tap an item to pop it into the pouch — watch your kit fill up.
Inside the pouch
3/6Why it matters
Sanitary pads. The single most requested item — and the difference between attending school and staying home.
Our first 500+ packs
With help from her family, Manaal Khalid created more than 500 sanitary packs containing toilet paper, various pads, underwear, hand sanitiser and cleansing wipes. The packs were distributed to girls and women in Orangi Town, Karachi, and to women employed as domestic workers in Saudi Arabia.
Run your own drive
500+
Sanitary packs created
2
Countries reached
Karachi
Orangi Town distribution
Saudi Arabia
Domestic workers supported
Impact Dashboard
A living record of the work — updated as kits are packed, hours are logged and stories arrive.
0+
Sanitary packs distributed
0
Volunteer hours contributed
0
Stories collected
0+
Simulation visits
0
Resources downloaded
0
Countries reached
Programme momentum — twelve month view
Take Action
Every commitment below is designed to fit a student's calendar. Choose one, and a flower grows in the Garden of Hope — a small record of collective effort.
2 hrs / month
Join a remote team working on research, editing, design or kit logistics.
1 week
Collect hygiene supplies with a small team and assemble kits with your class.
30 minutes
Send unopened hygiene items to a partner site near you, using our checklist.
3 hrs
Write a research summary or lesson plan for the Umeed learning library.
1 hr / week
Help run a monthly campaign on dignity, education or health access.
45 minutes
Share a reflection, essay, poem or artwork for Stories & Voices.
4 hrs / month
Found a student chapter with our charter, templates and mentoring support.
2 hrs
Make a guide or story available in another language for wider reach.
The Garden of Hope
Each completed action plants a flower. Alone it is a small mark; together the field becomes a movement.
Choose an action above to plant the first flower.
Learn
Educational resources on women's rights, health, education, leadership and social issues around the world — written for students who want context rather than headlines.
Research summary
What the evidence does and does not show about hygiene access and days lost from class.
Article
Why distance, safety and cost shape enrolment as much as policy does.
Classroom pack
A 50-minute lesson plan built around the Her Choices experience, with discussion prompts.
Timeline
Key legal, educational and health milestones — with context on what changed on the ground.
Research summary
How care work is measured, why it is undercounted, and what redistribution looks like.
Guide
Charter template, first-term calendar, safeguarding basics and fundraising ethics.
Myth versus fact
Period poverty only affects low-income countries.
Girls' school enrolment has risen substantially over the past three decades.
Educating girls mainly benefits the individual student.
Women's university enrolment exceeds men's in many countries.
Understanding Through Perspective
Getting to school
A ten-minute bus ride on a subsidised pass.
A ninety-minute walk that ends when the rains begin.
A period
A supermarket aisle and a private bathroom.
Cloth, a shared latrine and a week of considered absence.
Choosing a subject
Interest, aptitude and a careers adviser.
Distance to the nearest lab, and whether the family can spare the labour.
Seeing a doctor
An appointment booked from a phone.
A day of travel, a day of waiting, a day of wages lost.
These comparisons are illustrative composites drawn from published research. They are offered to build perspective, not to characterise any single country or community.
