Naween A. Mangi has been a financial journalist for
the last 20 years. She began her career in 1995 and has since worked for
several local and international news organizations in Pakistan and the U.S.
From 2006 till 2015, Naween worked as the Pakistan Bureau Chief for New
York-based Bloomberg News. She currently contributes to Dawn, The Express
Tribune and Newsline Magazine.
As a free-lancer prior to joining Bloomberg News, Naween contributed to The
Friday Times, Herald Magazine and Dawn Newspaper, the three most premier
English-language publications in Pakistan. She has also been a contributor to
Asia Times, CNBC Asia, CNN, Businessweek Magazine and Forbes Magazine in New
York. In 2002, she became the founding business editor of The Daily Times, a
prominent English-language newspaper in Pakistan, a position she held for three
years. She worked as a staff reporter at Businessweek Magazine in New York
before that. Naween was assistant editor of Pakistan Business Update from 1997
to 1999, the nation's first privately-produced business news television
program. She has received journalism accolades including the Agahi Media Award and
the Citibank Journalism Award.
Naween received master’s degree in journalism from New York University in 2000
with a specialization in business and economic reporting and was the recipient
of the Edwin Diamond Award for most outstanding graduate journalism student.
She also won first prize and a scholarship from the Foreign Press Association
in New York. She received a bachelor’s degree in economics from the London
School of Economics in 1995. She attended the Karachi Grammar School in
Pakistan where she completed O' level and A' level examinations through the
University of Cambridge, U.K.
Naween reported on Pakistan’s rural economies, focusing in particular on
poverty among farming communities in the south. In 2008 she established a
charitable trust, which is registered with the government of Pakistan. The
objective of the Ali Hasan Mangi Memorial Trust, named in honor of her late
grandfather, is to create a model of development in a village called Khairo
Dero in southern Pakistan. The plan is to create a model that can be replicated
elsewhere as a way to galvanize community-led development in this neglected
area of a war-torn country.
Naween is the Managing Trustee and runs the organization as a small family
trust with mostly individual donations. She does this on an honorary basis
while working as a journalist. The trust's project village is a settlement of
about 500 households and is run with 25 paid community workers from the
village, all of whom Naween has recruited and trained.
The organization covers all aspects of development and projects include one
primary school with an enrollment of 700 children, adoption of two previously
non-functional government schools with 270 students, and a Community School
that functions as an early learning centre catering to 100 students. We have
also built and run a Community Clinic that sees 500 patients a month and
provides free testing and medication and a Community Centre that includes a
playground, a library with over 4,000 publications, a computer lab for technology
literacy classes and adult literacy/vocational training. We also run projects
in low-cost housing, water and sanitation, community infrastructure and
microloans for women.
