In a nutshell, when a woman is educated, she becomes the tide raising all ships.

This 2011 encounter occurred just after Walsh and her partner had founded Iqra Fund, a nonprofit aimed at building self-sustaining school systems in the mountains of Northern Pakistan. The organization has since grown significantly, having established 20 village schools for grades K-8 around Gilgit-Baltistan, enrolling 4,098 students and supporting 173 teachers. Via scholarship support, Iqra Fund is also seeing 70 first-generation women through university. Fourteen Iqra Fund-supported students are now their communities’ first female teachers. Three are employed as community health professionals, bringing local healthcare— especially female healthcare—to these remote mountain communities for the first time in their histories.

The region is changing rapidly, in no small part due to the role of Iqra Fund’s community-led, sustainable education model. As the region faces rapid warming due to climate change, increased tourism and geopolitical tensions, the organization is equipping a generation of leaders who will see their villages through the complexities of the future.

“I have so much gratitude for the path that my life has taken to be able to do this incredible work in service to so many children and families,” Walsh said. “It wasn’t always easy, but it was always the clear next step.”

Walsh describes herself growing up as the kid who didn’t fit inside the box. She was hyperactive, curious, always the dirtiest kid in class at the end of the day. She regards her younger self as impulsive, ready to try new things, which in young adulthood evolved into decisiveness and a thirst for adventure.

She chose to pursue a teaching degree while at Montana State University in Bozeman because she thought she could teach internationally and get paid to travel. She studied abroad in Holland and student-taught in a Maori village in New Zealand where students rode barefoot on horseback to class, and where she boar hunted with the chief. Here, Walsh experienced a deep sense of connectedness to land and community. Her time with the Maori people impacted her deeply, and Walsh carried the experience onward.

Walsh later began teaching for The Traveling School, a Bozeman-based organization that takes high-school girls abroad for a semester of school. Walsh led groups in South America, then South Africa, and even arranged for a semester in the Maori village where she’d student taught.

While teaching these girls abroad, Walsh said she came to believe that “one of the most powerful forces on earth is the adolescent girl,” especially in a supportive environment. Walsh describes this period in her life as stepping through open door after open door. “I was trusting that there was a path for me,” she said. “That every experience I’d had was leading to something next.”

In 2007, Walsh thought she would do another Traveling School semester when she started seeing DC, a former Bridger Bowl ski patroller, mountaineer and local avalanche forecaster.

“He said, ‘Hey, I’m heading to Pakistan in a couple months to go on a climbing expedition. Do you want to tag along?’” Walsh recalled.

The Karakoram Range, host to four of the world’s 14 peaks over 8,000 meters, had opened up to Western climbers in the ’70s, after active hostilities in Kashmir between India and Pakistan subsided somewhat—although the region remains disputed to this day. Mountaineers flooded to the expanse of rugged and unclimbed peaks. DC began climbing there in 2000 during his off seasons from avalanche forecasting. In 2004, he had partnered up with mountaineering legend Steve Swenson, who’d been active climbing in the Karakoram since 1980. Both climbers had built relationships with the Balti people, volunteering time and money to support girls’ education in the region.

In 2007, Walsh joined DC, Swenson and another climber named Mark Richey on their trip to Pakistan to climb Latok I. She was the only woman on the expedition. As the group made their way from lowland cities up into the mountains, local women whisked Walsh away from the men at every stop. Through translators, they told her about their lives and struggles. Walsh learned that many of the girls were married off before they’d even had their first period, bearing children when they’d scarcely left childhood themselves. She learned not to ask how many children each woman had had, but how many were still alive Questions swirled in Walsh’s mind. She needed more time with these kind, proud and capable people.

When she parted with her group on that trip, Walsh extended her stay in Pakistan to explore for several more weeks. On her eventual flight home, she sketched out a proposal for a doctorate: “A Case Study of Educational Needs, Obstacles, and Opportunities for Girls, Women, and Teachers in Remote Pakistan.” Walsh was granted funding to spend the next four years there building a body of research for her PhD.

She found that barriers to education—cultural, social and religious— compounded with a shortage of qualified women teachers, and limited community support for girls’ education. Through interviews, surveys and field observations, Walsh theorized that directly engaging communities, training teachers and implementing culturally sensitive education would all move the needle immensely for Balti girls. Gilgit- Baltistan didn’t need more schools— plenty stood empty of children, instead sheltering goat herds or crops—the region needed an educational system, which required money.

Despite swearing she wouldn’t start a nonprofit at the end of her research—“I’m not going to spend the rest of my life fundraising”—it became apparent that no one else would. If she returned to academia with a shiny doctorate, she would be turning her back on the people she’d come to love and respect. So in 2011, she and DC co-founded Iqra Fund, received their first donations, and hired their first teachers in Hushe. In Islam, Iqra means to read or gain knowledge, and is believed to be the first word revealed to the Prophet Muhammad in the Quran. It is also the name of a young girl, Iqra Afzal, who had inspired Walsh on her first trip to Pakistan.

Iqra Fund’s first priority was addressing access. If families had any means to send a child to school, they tended to choose sons over daughters. In Balti culture, sons remain part of the family, while daughters marry into another family. Educating boys was an economic calculation made necessary by the poverty of the region: If a son could earn more because of an education, some of that would come back to the family; any earnings a daughter realized would benefit someone else.

“But they didn’t realize another house will come to their home as a daughter,” said Ghulam Muhammad, the country director for Pakistan, who has been with Iqra Fund since 2012. If all the women in a community are educated, every family they marry into will see the benefits of that education. So Iqra Fund provided the means for all children— boys and girls—to go to school, which the organization recognizes as a human right, as well as the best way to ensure girls receive their education. Families no longer had to choose. To boot, a mountain of research clearly defines the importance of educating girls.

“When girls are educated, child and early marriage rates decrease, families are smaller and healthier, infant and maternal mortality rates go down, wages go up, and GDP grows,” as articulated on the Iqra Fund website. “Educating girls is also one of the top means of addressing climate change.”

Girls also tend to come back to their communities after completing their education, while it’s easier for Pakistani men to work in big cities for higher pay. In a nutshell, when a woman is educated, she becomes the tide raising all ships.

After enrolling 100 percent of a village’s children, the next priority was quality, Muhammad explained. Some parents weren’t convinced of the value of education. They hadn’t received one, and the teachers in the schools that did exist frequently didn’t show up. With the power of the purse, Iqra Fund was able to seek out, vet and hire high-quality teachers in a sufficient ratio for students to thrive.

The last hurdle was sustainability. To build school systems that can outlast even the organization itself, Iqra Fund needed the communities to take ownership of the system. They couldn’t be Western schools air-dropped into the mountains. They needed to be Hushe’s school, the Machulu’s school, and Basho’s school.

“We work in these very traditional, rural regions, and everything we do … from the way that we dress to the way we speak to the way we are collectively working to protect the honor of young women—that’s vital to those relationships and sustainability,” said CJ Carter, strategic planning director for Iqra Fund. “There is no Iqra Fund without the public partnerships and social trust.”

Part of the sustainability equation includes partnering with the government to put as many teachers on their payroll as possible, even if Iqra Fund helps pay their salaries. This way, if Iqra Fund was suddenly no longer able to operate in the country, the education system would endure.

Slowly, the organization gained the trust of communities, and grew up alongside its first crop of students. Initially, the goal was to provide K-8 education, but when the girls were in 8th grade, their communities pushed for 9th and 10th grades as well. Then 11th and 12th, and so on.

“Education, I must say, it is not an easy job,” Muhummad said. “It is a very long process.”

But in letting communities cast the vision and lead the way, Iqra Fund has successfully supported the first generation of educated women for many remote Balti villages. And scholarships have allowed for the next step, attending high school and college in the city of Skardu. Iqra Fund’s current initiative is to build
a high school in the valley of Basha, where it educates a high concentration of students, along with transportation to school from up and down the valley.

The organization hopes to build a critical mass of educated women in Gilgit-Baltistan, with this first generation paving the way for the next, until a culture of scholarship blankets the region. Walsh envisions the day when Iqra Fund can step completely out of the way because the Balti people have everything they need to continue the cycle. Currently, of Iqra Fund’s more than 70 staff members, only two are non-Pakistani: Walsh and Carter.

Education in the region may not yet be self-sustaining, but changes are already evident. The first group of Iqra Fund-supported girls are now entering the workforce. Nureen Fizza is now on staff at Iqra Fund as a social mobilizer while she wraps up her BS in chemistry. She remembers that day 13 years ago when she met Walsh, and ponders an alternate reality without Iqra Fund.

“In my village, there are many girls my age who are working in the field and getting married,” Fizza said. “They have three to four children also, so they have many challenges. As compared to those girls, I am very thankful to Iqra Fund for their generous support.”

Belqis Bano, the daughter of the basecamp cook from DC and Swenson’s mountaineering expeditions, is now a scholarship student studying to become a doctor and achieve her definition
of success.

“I think when people are able to help other people and when they make other lives [better], I think this is success,” Bano said.

And Sakina Batool, an Iqra Fund scholarship recipient from Basha Valley, has graduated and is the first female health worker in the area, delivering prenatal care to local women in the region for the first time. Her elders will not start meetings without her.

“A girl’s education is a community’s future.” – Genevieve Walsh, Iqra Fund CEO and Founder

Many IF Girls, as the organization calls them, have become teachers—the first need for these communities was women to teach the girls. But the horizons expand with each class. Fizza will be the first chemistry lecturer. Madiha Noor will be the first software engineer. Amina Hanif will be the first woman owner of a mountain guiding company. And each of these pursuits will undoubtedly benefit their communities in one way or another.

As Walsh puts it, “A girl’s education is a community’s future.”

As for funding, much comes from the mountaineering community and the Pakistani diaspora. After learning about Iqra Fund and its work in their homeland, many Pakistani-Americans have joined the movement as donors and board members. This was the case for Saima Machlovi, a neuroscientist in New York City who was born downriver from Hushe in the tiny village of Machulu.

“Since I’ve been on the board, everyone in the village knows about it,” Machlovi said. “So every time there’s a problem they would call me or they would tell my parents about it, and they are like, ‘Hey, do you think Iqra could help here?’ and we’re like, ‘Let’s look into this.’”

Iqra Fund has a $1 million operating budget. According to Walsh, 80 percent comes from 20 percent of the donors. And more than 50 percent of funding flows in during Ramadan when many Muslim donors give Zakat, an obligatory form of charitable giving. Zakat funds are earmarked for girls from underprivileged backgrounds, a tool for social mobility in remote Baltistan.

In the face of a rapidly changing world, the importance of education cannot be understated. As Walsh explains, empowering these girls gives their communities a seat at the table in a very geopolitically important region. Pakistan is a nuclear power, regularly at war with India, another nuclear power. And its other neighbors, Iran and Afghanistan, haven’t exactly been scions of peace. Additionally, Gilgit-Baltistan is home to the largest volume of glacial ice in the world outside of the poles, providing water to some 270 million people downstream.

“Education for us here is the lynchpin to the future of the region, and I would argue the nation,” Carter said. “I see the people living in these headwaters as the guardians. And without the toolkit, that’s bad for all of us.”

With every Balti girl who completes her education, the revolution grows. And while it started with girls like Nureen Fizza learning quietly among the boys, Iqra Fund has helped to give the movement a voice and a foothold. But the Balti people will be the ones sounding the trumpet from the mountain’s top.

Bay Stephens writes from his home in Avon, Colorado, where he’s lucky enough to ski patrol in the winters and trail-build in the summers.