Ms. Karim spent her early years in Madagascar, France and Canada. After graduating from McGill University with a double major in political science and modern languages, she left for Switzerland to pursue a master in international relations at HEI, in Geneva. During this time, Ms. Karim focused on refugee issues and worked with UNHCR during the Burundi refugee crisis, and was involved in setting human rights standards for refugee and asylum cases in central and eastern European states. She also supervised the elections in Bihac, Bosnia after the Dayton Accords, with the OSCE. Deciding to move on to the ‘field’ and engage in hands on development work, Farahnaz spent two years with UNOPS/UNDP, based out of Islamabad to work in Taliban Afghanistan setting up mobile libraries for children in schools, community centres in villages for women’s education and skills training, and contributing to the BBC’s New Home, New Life radio soap opera to provide life saving information to villagers whose only mean of outreach was the radio. It is there that Farahnaz’s passion for development led her to think about ways to have sustainable policy and development impact. She wrote some policy briefs which were shared with the UN in New York on the situation in Afghanistan in the late 1990s, and did some cross-border relief work in Central Asia. She joined the Harvard Kennedy School to pursue a MPA, where she focused on management of public entities, development economics and social entrepreneurship.  Ms. Karim then played a co-founding role in a private management consulting start up in Italy, and returned to Afghanistan in 2002 where she quickly rose to head a large non-profit in Afghanistan, ACTED. As country director, her responsibilities included fund-raising, project management, development strategy and the management of a team of some fifteen expatriates and over 1,000 Afghan staff. The work ranged from building schools and giving small loans to repairing roads and helping farmers grow food again. By the end of her assignment, ACTED Afghanistan tripled its budget to multi-year funding of US$15 million.  She was then asked to join GTZ, the World Bank and Afghan government in helping them monitor the implementation of the NSP – a massive rural development program involving some 20 NGOs and 6,000 villages at the time. She was quickly promoted to assistant team leader. She left Afghanistan and did some lecturing and consulting work in New York while building up Insaan Group with her former colleagues. In 2007, Insaan was registered and successfully funded in part by the Pierre and Pamela Omidyar Fund.