About
A platform where empathy leads to action.
Project Umeed was founded by Manaal Khalid to combine storytelling, education and community service — helping people better understand women's experiences and contribute to meaningful change.
Our approach
Umeed is the word for hope. We treat hope as a practice rather than a feeling.
Project Umeed exists because information about women's lives is abundant and understanding of them is not. We build experiences that slow a reader down — a simulation, a story, an atlas that refuses to rank — and then hand them something concrete to do with what they have learned.
The work runs on three tracks. Storytelling builds perspective. Education gives that perspective structure and evidence. Direct action — dignity kits, drives, chapters — turns it into something a community can hold in its hands.
We are young, small and deliberate. We would rather publish six resources we can defend than sixty we cannot, and we would rather pack five hundred kits well than promise five thousand.
Meet the founder
Manaal Khalid founded Project Umeed in 2025.
A student, builder and organiser who started with one simulation and a stack of hygiene kits — and turned them into a platform.
Manaal Khalid founded Project Umeed in 2025, after building Her Choices — an interactive simulation that asks visitors to walk through decisions a young woman makes about school, health and family — and discovering that people acted on stories in a way they never acted on statistics.
That same year she helped assemble and distribute the first women's dignity kits, packed by volunteers and delivered through schools and community partners. The two efforts became one organisation: understanding on one side, direct action on the other.
She now leads the platform's storytelling, education and youth chapter work, keeping the same rule at the centre of it — dignity first, always.
Manaal Khalid — Founder, Project Umeed
Read her story in fullPrinciples
Four rules we hold ourselves to.
Dignity first
We never publish identifiable faces, never trade on pity, and never describe a person by what they lack.
Context over conclusions
We resist rankings and simplifications. Complexity is not an obstacle to understanding; it is the subject of it.
Youth-led, adult-supported
Students run the programmes. Mentors advise on safeguarding, sourcing and partnership ethics.
Action as the test
If a visitor leaves moved but unchanged, the work is unfinished. Every page ends in something you can do.