Business Daily Meets: Dr Yasmeen Lari
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 22 December 2023
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Pakistan's first female architect came out of retirement to help rebuild her country after the 2005 earthquake.
Now she's helping communities devastated by the 2022 floods.
Dr Lari talks about her experience starting out in a male-dominated field, the changing focus of her career, and her mission to build a million flood-resilient homes in Pakistan by 2024.
Produced and presented by Emb Hashmi.
(Image: Dr Yasmeen Lari. Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Something mysterious plagues County Mayo on the West Coast of Ireland, and its legendary Gaelic football team. |
| 0:06.1 | Sometimes I think there's something sinister going on. |
| 0:09.4 | I believe in the curse. I think it's real. |
| 0:11.6 | Listen to the curious tale of The Mayo Curse on Amazing Sports Stories from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:17.9 | Search for amazing sports stories wherever you get your BBC podcasts. |
| 0:23.6 | Hello, I'm M Hashmi and welcome to Business Daily Meets on the BBC World Service. This is where we bring you in-depth interviews with influential people from across the globe. |
| 0:36.2 | Today I'm speaking to Dr. Yasmin Lari, who is widely celebrated as |
| 0:40.9 | Pakistan's first female architect, starting her practice in the country in the 60s and 70s. |
| 0:48.2 | My guest male architects did feel that I was a kind of a competition and I think that's when |
| 0:53.5 | the issues started and maybe |
| 0:56.5 | the contractors were a little bit unhappy. They didn't want to take orders from a woman. But apart |
| 1:00.9 | from that, it wasn't so bad. Dr. Lari retired in the year 2000 but came out of retirement after the 2005 |
| 1:09.0 | earthquake which killed 80,000 people and left 400,000 families displaced. |
| 1:16.0 | Now at the age of 82, Dr. Lari is working hard to help those affected by last year's bloods. |
| 1:22.4 | It's a very, very disturbing situation, but where millions even today are shelterless, homeless, |
| 1:29.4 | and really hunger is all over the place. I believe very much in certain principles. And currently |
| 1:37.6 | what I'm following is zero carbon, zero waste, and even zero donor, which is leading to zero poverty. |
| 1:46.3 | That's Dr. Yasmin Lari coming up on Business Daily. |
| 1:51.6 | August 22 saw one of the world's worst climate disasters rip through Pakistan |
| 1:58.4 | as vicious floods left one third of the country underwater and 33 million people, half of them children, affected. |
| 2:07.9 | More than 1,700 people lost their lives in the flooding and almost 13,000 were injured. |
| 2:14.9 | Over a year on, many people are still living without essentials and in |
... |
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