Pakistan’s volunteer network ‘MilKar’ wins Commonwealth Innovation Award
Pakistan’s largest volunteer network Milkar has won the esteemed Commonwealth Innovation Award for Sustainable Development 2023.
The selection process spanned several months and involved over 70 jury members.
Commonwealth’s Secretary General Patricia Scotland presented the prestigious award to team MilKar. It was a recognition of the 15 exceptional innovations from over 3,000 nominations across 56 Commonwealth countries.
The design of Milkar is just like that of a platform like ‘Uber’ that connects volunteers with social projects and reimagines development challenges into volunteering opportunities. It aims at achieving sustainability by mobilising, connecting, and enabling the community to take ownership of projects, it rewrites the fundamental challenge of development initiatives.
In the past three years, Milkar has become Pakistan’s largest independent youth volunteer platform. The network has grown to over 12,317 volunteers and 261 NGOs, which have worked on 566 community service projects impacting 2.9 million people.
Moreover, MilKar took an initiative with the government to convert student volunteering hours into academic credits across several universities in Pakistan.
Muhammad Hadi Saif, Head of Volunteers at MilKar, declared the award a significant accolade for Pakistan.
Syed Kashf Ahmed, the Project Director, received this award as part of the Commonwealth Innovation Week organised in Nairobi, Kenya.
The Commonwealth Innovation Awards acknowledge and celebrate the efforts of innovators in the public, private, and NGO sectors working on achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Each award category aligns with the five pillars of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development: people, planet, prosperity, peace, and partnership.