A senior Pakistani executive of Google, Tania Aidrus quit her position at the tech giant to lead Prime Minister Imran Khan’s ‘Digital Pakistan’ initiative. Her decision to serve the country has won the hearts of Pakistanis who took to Twitter to thank her for her efforts.
According to reports, Tania arrived in Pakistan from Singapore to offer her services to the country’s digitalisation programme.
Tania was the Chief of Staff and Head of Strategic Initiatives on the Next Billion Users (NBU) team at Google which is focused on building new products and services that are aimed at addressing the emerging trends and needs of users in growth markets.
Prior to this, Tania was a leader in the Global Business Organisation at Google in the US and then in Singapore where she was the Country Manager for South Asia Frontier Markets at Google focused on expanding the Internet ecosystem, increasing product adoption amongst consumers and businesses and accelerating innovation.
Before being part of Google, Tania co-founded a mobile health diagnosis company called ClickDiagnostics which was focused on connecting rural patients in emerging markets to doctors globally. She also spent a portion of her career consulting for Fortune 500 companies and the US Government at Booz Allen Hamilton.
Tania holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management and a BSc from Brandeis University.
PM Imran Khan inaugurated the ‘Digital Pakistan’ campaign on Thursday. The campaign was executed by the Ministry of Information Technology (MoIT), who were tasked with digitising all correspondence between the government offices. They were given only three months to complete the task.
According to a statement, Digital Pakistan is a comprehensive plan which will help the country in competing in the digital market globally and will also create jobs and ease for the people of Pakistan.
Earlier in September, senior PTI leader Jahangir Tareen had announced the government had engaged a senior former Google executive to help revamp its payment system and set into motion the digitisation initiative.
He said the government had persuaded the Google executive, who was in Singapore, to lead the project from Pakistan, after a lot of effort and headhunting.
“She is leaving Google. In fact, she has left it and she is moving to Pakistan and will lead the digitisation initiative,” Tareen had said.
