From Pakistan to the World: Nida Yousaf Sheikh’s Impactful Journey
Nida Yousaf Sheikh (BSc ’16), co-founder and CEO of Tayaba / H2O Technologies, has been named one of the six winners of the 2025 Unlock Her Future Prize (South Asia Edition) by The Bicester Collection. Her social enterprise is at the forefront of tackling one of Pakistan’s most pressing challenges: water scarcity. Under Nida’s leadership, H2O Technologies builds innovative solutions that harness atmospheric humidity and solar energy to produce safe drinking water, offering scalable and sustainable pathways for underserved communities.
As part of the Prize, Nida and her venture will receive seed funding, global mentorship, and executive-education support from Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford, a powerful opportunity to scale their impact and strengthen organisational capacity.
In Munich, Nida returned to the global stage at One Young World 2025, where she shared Tayaba’s journey of transformative impact: reaching 1 million people and delivering more than half a billion litres of safe water to climate-vulnerable communities in under four years.
She highlighted the story of Issiyaan and millions like her, young women who once carried unsafe water long distances on their backs, now empowered through the H2OWheel, a 40-litre rolling device that replaces daily hardship with dignity, ease, and opportunity.
From its early, low-tech beginnings with the H2O Wheel to advanced, renewable-powered innovations like H2O Solar and H2O Air, which generates clean drinking water directly from humidity, Tayaba continues to redefine what accessible, climate-resilient water solutions can be.
Representing this vision on the One Young World main stage, Nida shared Tayaba’s mission, energy, and purpose with a global audience, while expressing deep gratitude to her mentors, particularly Hamzah Sarwar and Philipp Küst, for their belief in the H2O mission.
Today, Nida and her team are driving an ambitious goal: lifting 25 million people out of water scarcity by 2030. LUMS is immensely proud of Nida, her remarkable achievements, and the global impact she continues to create.
Watch Nida on the One Young World 2025 main stage:
