A Million Girls
Given a Voice
100+ co-created stories. A free mobile platform. One million girls in Pakistan, many of whom had never had a trusted space to explore the questions shaping their lives, finally able to access one.
Human-Centred Design, Co-Creation & Content Lead
White Rice led the full creative and research cycle for Springster Pakistan. That meant in-school human-centred design research and co-creation sessions with girls across religious and socioeconomic backgrounds, followed by the development of over 100 unique mobile-first content stories spanning financial wellbeing, safety, health, voice, and agency. Every story was designed with the girls who would read it.
Key Outcomes
Zero cost.
One million girls.
The Challenge
Pakistan's adolescent girls face a particular kind of information poverty. The questions that matter most, about their bodies, their safety, their money, their right to speak, are precisely the questions that home, school, and community offer the least trustworthy or least available answers to. The topics are too sensitive for open conversation, too personal for the classroom, and too complex for the internet content that does exist to address with cultural nuance.
The Nike Foundation's global Springster programme had an answer: a mobile-first content platform built specifically for adolescent girls, designed to be their trusted companion on the topics that matter. White Rice's challenge was to bring that platform to life in Pakistan, in a way that reflected the full diversity of Pakistani girls, not a single imagined composite of who they were supposed to be.
That meant designing content that could speak authentically to a Muslim girl from Lahore and a Christian girl from Karachi's inner city; to a girl in school and one who had dropped out; to a girl whose mother allowed her to use a phone and one who had to borrow one secretly. The platform had to be genuinely universal, which meant starting not with assumptions, but with the girls themselves.
They don't lack curiosity. They lack a space that feels safe enough to be curious in, and content that feels like it was actually made for them.
The Strategy
Before a single story was written or a single illustration sketched, White Rice spent significant time in schools and communities, conducting human-centred design research across diverse populations of girls in Pakistan. The methodology was immersive and participatory: girls were not research subjects, they were co-designers.
Built by girls.
For girls.
The co-creation sessions were held in schools across different communities, bringing together girls from Muslim and Christian backgrounds, from different regional and class contexts, to design the platform alongside White Rice's team. Not as feedback providers, but as authors.
The four topics Pakistani girls most needed, and least had access to.
No data.
No cost.
No barriers.
Always.
At the time of the programme, Facebook's Internet.org initiative provided free mobile access to a curated set of platforms, without requiring a data plan. For Pakistani girls, this was transformative. A girl who had no personal phone, no data, and no money could borrow a family member's handset, open Internet.org, and access Springster for as long as she needed, at zero cost.
The platform's mobile-first design was not a stylistic choice. It was the fundamental design constraint that shaped every decision: how long a story could be, how much text could appear on screen, how images had to load, and how navigation had to work for someone who might be using the phone quickly, in private, with limited time before it was needed back.
- Zero data required : accessible on any phone, on any network, including 2G
- Culturally resonant visuals : illustrations co-created with Pakistani girls to reflect who they actually are
- Story-led content : not listicles or fact sheets, but narratives with characters and emotional truth
- Designed for sharing : content that girls could send to friends, making the platform self-spreading within peer networks
Pakistan's girls are not one girl.
The platform was designed to know that.
The Impact
Over one million girls in Pakistan accessed Springster. That number would be remarkable for any digital platform in Pakistan. For one specifically targeting adolescent girls from low-income communities, on a free, zero-data platform, covering topics that Pakistani society rarely offered them any trusted space to explore, it was extraordinary.
Girls who would never have talked to anyone about these topics found something they could read privately, share with a friend, and return to again and again.
Springster Pakistan demonstrated what becomes possible when you design digital content with radical fidelity to who the audience actually is. Not who funders imagine them to be, not who they are supposed to become, but who they are right now: curious, capable, and hungry for a space that takes them seriously.
A million girls.
One question each.
Finally somewhere to ask it.
Springster worked not because it was a platform, but because it was a companion. A trusted voice in a girl's pocket, available at any hour, on any phone, with zero data, covering the things that actually mattered. That is what co-creation makes possible. And that is what a million Pakistani girls found.
