Karishma Ali

Karishma Ali is a 21-year old Pakistani footballer who is the first girl from her hometown of Chitral, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa to have represented the country on a national and international level. In 2016, Ali represented Pakistan at the Jubilee Games held in Dubai and she was part of the first Pakistani women's team to participate in the Australian Football League International Cup in 2017. She is also the founder of Chitral Women's Sports Club.

In 2019, she was listed in the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia List, where young people are chosen for innovation and entrepreneurship. Ali walked the Milan Fashion Week in 2019 when Haitian-Italian designer Stella Jean collaborated with craftswomen from a handicraft center Ali founded to create designs, incorporating cultural elements from Chitral and Kalash.

Karishma is from Chitral and began playing football at an early age. She has been professionally trained as a footballer since the age of 15.

She has been playing in national and international tournaments. In 2016, she won a silver medal at the Jubilee Games in Dubai. She was also part of the first women's team to represent Pakistan at the Australian Football League International Cup in 2017.

As of April 2019, she has been acquiring a bachelor's degree in business administration from the University of London.

Karishma has founded the Chitral Women's Sports Club, which is the first women's sports club in Chitral. The club, which opened in 2018, has 60 female members who are being trained for football and other sports.

Ali is also the founder of Chitral Women's Handicrafts Center.

In 2019, Haitian-Italian designer Stella Jean traveled to Pakistan as part of her collection Laboratory of Nations, where the designer aimed to bridge a gap between Italy and nine of its mission destinations, one of which was Pakistan. The aim was to promote United Nations' Strategic Development Goals and empower women from rural areas. In Pakistan, Jean collaborated with Karishma Ali to create designs, using traditional embroidery from the Chitral and Kalash area. Jean also traveled to the Kalash Valley, where she met with women from the Chitral Women's Handicrafts Center, founded by Ali. Forty-six women from the center created 400 meters of embroidery, that Jean used in her collection, which was featured on Vogue.

At the Milan Fashion Week 2019, Ali walked the ramp in one of the designs made in the collaborative project. She later thanked the designer for paying a 'heart-felt homage to our culture by infusing the embroidery done by women of Pakistan in the northern areas as an essential part of her collection'