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Asma Kundi had been using ride-hailing services to get home from work for years when an otherwise ordinary journey in Islamabad took a turn she still remembers clearly.
Near the end of the ride, Kundi, a journalist who’s worked in the city for 18 years, realised she didn't have the exact change. When she told the driver, he replied, “Tau mein kya karoon”, or “What am I supposed to do about it?” She asked if he could get change from a nearby store, then called her son to see if there was cash at home. Before getting out, she told the driver that the way he’d spoken to her was inappropriate.
“When I got home, I was still so flustered and frustrated that I ended up giving a one-star review to the driver, even though I usually always leave a good rating,” Kundi says. A short while later, the driver called her. His account had been suspended following her complaint. “There must have been more complaints before me, for this to act like the final straw,” she says. “But he put the blame solely on me.”
Kundi believes the driver worked out that she’d complained because she’d been his last passenger before the suspension. He then spent the night parked outside her home, demanding that she compensate him for the 12 hours he couldn't work, and refusing to leave even after she threatened to call the police.
The experience has changed how her 13-year-old daughter thinks about ride-hailing. “If I’m going somewhere and ask her to join, she’ll ask me if I’m using a ride-share, and when I tell her I am she usually refuses to come,” Kundi says.
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Kundi can't remember whether that particular trip was with Yango or inDrive. She uses both, usually depending on which is cheaper on the day, and says she’s noticed what she sees as a lack of driver training across the two platforms.
Her experience is an extreme one, but it sits within a wider debate over safety in Pakistan’s ride-hailing market. In April this year, Lahore police arrested a driver for an unidentified ride-hailing service after a woman accused him of harassment and assault. Four months earlier, Pakistan’s Federal Ombudsperson Secretariat for Protection Against Harassment had directed Yango and inDrive to demonstrate their compliance with the country’s workplace harassment law following multiple complaints against drivers.
And yet Kundi still uses ride-hailing to get to work. The alternative, she says, is relying on her husband or using public transport she doesn't feel safe taking alone. She doesn't own a car.
That contradiction sits at the heart of Pakistan’s ride-hailing market. For a cohort of women, these apps have made independent mobility possible, but the service they want most isn't simply a car that arrives, it's a car they can trust.
A market built on trust
Women’s mobility was a problem in Pakistan long before Careem launched in the country in 2015. Public transport can be limited or unreliable, while social expectations around women moving through public space add another layer of friction. Ride-hailing didn't remove those constraints, but for some women it created a new way around them.
Maira*, a student at Aga Khan University Hospital who moved to Karachi from Lahore for her studies, had always had access to private transport at home. In Karachi, without a car of her own, ride-hailing became the main way she got around.
“For most women it’s often very scary, especially the first few times, and compared to being abroad it’s a different kind of fear,” she says. “I think the reason for that is that when the rides do go downhill it makes it to social media, so it makes you more apprehensive, but I haven’t had any such experience.”
Urban development and mobility specialist Huma Daha describes the change in more practical terms. “The more the system has improved, the greater the accessibility for females,” she says. “For example, with inDrive men might book randomly, but women will always look at driver ratings. We [women] used to take registration pictures of taxis, now we don’t need to because the vehicle and driver are already registered online.”
Careem became the shorthand for that shift. “I’m calling a Careem” became more common than “I’m calling a ride”, and the brand built much of its position around reliability and trust. An Oxford Economics study commissioned by Careem found that 36% of its Pakistani customers were women. In an analysis of Q1 2019 Careem data included in the same report, 70% of 332 female respondents said they felt safe or very safe riding with Careem. None said they felt unsafe and 2% said they felt very unsafe.
By 2021, Careem said it had more than 1,586 female captains registered in Pakistan, who’d collectively completed more than 570,000 rides. It also said all captains underwent background checks and gender-sensitisation training, with more than 200,000 hours of training delivered through partnerships including Aahung and UNDP.
Fiza Amjad, co-founder of atomcamp, says ride-hailing also gave some women a way to make a case for working outside the home because commuting could be made more predictable. Miral Sharif, country manager at Yango Pakistan, remembers how, when she got her first job almost 12 years ago, she had no straightforward way of getting there and ended up paying for a custom transport service that cost around 80% of her salary. Fast forward to today and ride-hailing has become the norm for a select class of Pakistani women.
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“Ride-hailing enables you to participate in economic activity in society for yourself, your house, your family, and that is true for men and women alike,” Sharif says.
Careem had also invested heavily in how it recruited and vetted its drivers. In a 2017 interview, then Careem Pakistan CEO Junaid Iqbal described a five-step onboarding process that included training, a driving test, a vehicle fitness certificate and extensive background checks. Beyond verifying a driver's NIC and licence, Careem would visit their home, check their reputation in the neighbourhood and require a police certificate. If anything couldn't be verified, they couldn't become a captain.
That's not to say Careem didn't have problems of its own. The company faced service complaints, while the 1,586 female captains it reported in 2021 represented only a fraction of its overall driver base. But the lengths it went to in vetting and training drivers help explain why so many women came to trust the service. They also came at a cost, one that would become increasingly difficult to justify as Pakistan's ride-hailing market grew more competitive and price-sensitive.
Then the market moved to price
By the time Careem suspended its Pakistan ride-hailing service on July 18, 2025, the market it’d helped create looked very different.
Careem co-founder Mudassir Sheikha said the decision came down to Pakistan’s challenging macroeconomic environment, intensifying competition and global capital allocation, which together made it difficult to justify the investment required to provide what he described as a safe and dependable service.
The market itself had also become much larger. “When Careem first came in there were maybe 800,000 rides happening daily across all cities, now there’s probably 3x rides happening daily across all platforms,” a Yango spokesperson told FWDstart. “And to top it off, inflation has really gone up and so have international fuel prices.”
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