The L’Oreal Pakistan SDPI award has recognised the company’s work helping women earn a living, honouring programmes that train survivors of acid attacks and domestic violence in beauty skills and teach women running home-based businesses the digital and financial skills to grow them. The recognition came in the Inclusive Development and Economic Growth category at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute’s 29th Sustainable Development Conference in Islamabad.
- Award: Inclusive Development and Economic Growth category, SDPI Sustainability Awards
- Event: 29th Sustainable Development Conference and Sustainability Investment Expo, 2 to 5 November 2026, Allama Iqbal Open University, Islamabad
- Theme: Rethinking Development in an Age of Disruption
- Programmes honoured: Beauty for a Better Life, and the Digital Literacy Program
- Partners: Fondation L’Oreal, the Depilex SmileAgain Foundation, the L’Oreal Fund for Women and CIRCLE
What the L’Oreal Pakistan SDPI Award Recognised
SDPI’s annual conference is one of Pakistan’s longest running development gatherings, and its awards pick out work that combines commercial operations with measurable social outcomes. L’Oreal Pakistan’s entry rested on two community programmes that have been running for years rather than on a single campaign. The judges’ category, Inclusive Development and Economic Growth, is aimed at exactly that: economic participation for people the formal economy tends to leave out, in this case women rebuilding their lives and women working from home.
The timing underlines why the work matters. Pakistan ranked third from bottom in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2026, released in September, a reminder of how far female economic participation still has to travel. Against that backdrop, programmes that convert directly into income carry weight beyond their size.
The conference itself is one of the fixtures of Pakistan’s policy calendar. SDPI, the country’s oldest independent think tank, has run the Sustainable Development Conference since the 1990s, and the 29th edition paired four days of panels at Allama Iqbal Open University with the Sustainability Investment Expo, where companies present their sustainability programmes to policymakers and investors. The Sustainability Awards sit inside that machinery, and they are judged on documented outcomes rather than pledges. That is why the L’Oreal Pakistan SDPI award carries weight in the development community, and why the company’s two community programmes, one built with a foundation that has worked with burn survivors for decades and one built for the smartphone era, were the substance of its entry.
Beauty Skills That Rebuild Lives
Beauty for a Better Life, supported by the Fondation L’Oreal and implemented in Pakistan with the Depilex SmileAgain Foundation, trains survivors of domestic violence and acid attacks in beauty and hairstyling skills so they can earn a dignified living and rebuild their lives. Thousands of women have gained vocational beauty skills through the programme. It works because the beauty trade is one of the few in Pakistan where a trained woman can start earning quickly, from home or in a salon, with modest equipment.
Photo: L’Oreal Pakistan, via News Update Times
Digital Skills for Home-Based Businesses
The second programme, the Digital Literacy Program, is supported by the L’Oreal Fund for Women and run with CIRCLE, a Pakistani social enterprise focused on women’s economic inclusion. It teaches women the digital and financial skills to grow home-based businesses: selling through phones and social platforms, handling digital payments and keeping basic records. A third strand, the L’Oreal Paris Stand Up Against Street Harassment programme run with Bedari, trains bystanders in safe intervention, and at the Sustainability Investment Expo the company also presented L’Oreal for the Future, its global sustainability programme.
A Second Sustainability Honour in a Month
The SDPI award is L’Oreal Pakistan’s second recognition in a month. In October it took first position in the Sustainability Award, Four Pillars of Excellence category for small and medium sized enterprises at the Global Compact Network Pakistan Sustainability Awards 2026. The two honours point the same way as other recent gains for women’s economic participation in Pakistan, from the five women founders who won She’s Next Pakistan grants to financial inclusion reaching 71 percent as the gender gap narrows, and they land as backers line up behind women-led businesses, including the World Bank’s proposed $50 million fund of funds for Pakistani startups.
Receiving the SDPI recognition, the company’s leadership said L’Oreal believes in using beauty as a force for good, and committed to keep empowering women by building their capabilities, creating sustainable livelihood opportunities and advocating for safe, inclusive spaces where they can thrive.
Sources
- LHR Times: L’Oreal Pakistan Wins SDPI Award for Women’s Economic Empowerment, 4 November 2026
- The AZB: L’Oreal Pakistan Recognised at SDPI Conference for Advancing Women’s Economic Empowerment, 4 November 2026
- News Update Times: L’Oreal Pakistan Recognised for Sustainability Leadership at GCNP Sustainability Awards 2026, October 2026
- Featured image: The L’Oreal Pakistan team receives the Inclusive Development and Economic Growth award at SDPI’s 29th Sustainable Development Conference in Islamabad. Photo: LHR Times
- In-body image: A L’Oreal Pakistan representative receives the GCNP Sustainability Award trophy in October 2026. Photo: L’Oreal Pakistan, via News Update Times
Umar Farooq is the founder and editor of Good News Pakistan. An engineer by profession and a writer by passion, he started the site in December 2022 to share good news from Pakistan, and has since written and edited more than 200 articles about its people, sports, science, business and world records. He believes the story of Pakistan is bigger than its headlines, and that good news, told honestly, is worth telling every day.