Nasira's first attempt at devising an education programme for illiterate women didn't work as well as Nasira had intended. But it was this set back which led to a method of teaching which is lauded throughout Pakistan and abroad.

"We started working on an education programme for women in January 1990. We knew we had to come up with something a bit different. If you look at the history of adult education in Pakistan, it's a total failure. Working with women from low-income families is especially difficult, because they have to work the whole day through to earn money and provide for their children. It is even more difficult when the women don't feel confident about what education can do for them.

"We wanted to create some kind of alternative education, but we couldn't find an established method of education which would suit women's needs and that would help women to tackle repression and exploitation. So the onus was on us to create our own programme, to develop the contents of that programme, and then to create the materials.

"In the beginning I was the main person. It was my vision. But I never realised how tough a job it was going to be. I thought, 'Okay, Its not difficult to jot things down and develop a programme'. I also realized that it was not possible to sustain the interest of women with the traditional methods of teaching. They are time-consuming they are monotonous boring. Women just couldn't afford to devote the time needed. How could they give three four, or five years of their lives? It was impossible.

"Traditional methods of adult education didn't respond to the needs of the learners. And the subject matter was totally irrelevant to people's lives - as individuals, as members of society. The first thing I wanted to do was to develop a phonetic method of teaching - one which was based on issues that were relevant to the women's lives. 'No problem', I thought. I come from a family with an academic tradition, so I started work on the teacher's manual. When it was done, it was produced and launched to community workers.

"But when we started using it, we soon found out that 80 percent of the contents were not useful, even though it was produced by someone who was academically very good and who was confident that teaching people to read and write was a very mundane job! So it hurt my pride that I couldn't do it".

"But it had to change, and I looked again at what we had learned from the trails. I tried to find out what the problems were, and how to put them right. I can now say - with a degree of satisfaction - that we have developed a very comprehensive method of teaching. In fact, there is no other example of this kind of teaching in the country, not one that is so efficient or effective".

"The solutions came from the women themselves. Completely illiterate women raised questions which I didn't always have answers for. So I went away and found the answers. That's how we have developed. We now have issue - based education, which uses phonetics to teach people how to read and write".