Standards, halal trade, and the courage to come home

The director general’s international path

Muzamil opens by noting that Khattak is “one of our most special guests,” the Director General of Pakistan National Accreditation Council who has visited over fifty countries. Khattak’s journey began in Pakistan, where she studied at Burnhall and Bishar University, but at age nine she went to Australia on scholarship to study environmental management.

The move abroad was deliberate, not driven by desperation. “Actually, for me, it’s very normal,” Khattak says when Muzamil asks if being accomplished as a woman is unusual. “I was brought up in a family which is very, very educated. The credit goes to my father and mother. For me, there’s no shocking thing that I became a director general or I studied abroad.” Her father was a civil engineer. Her parents did not hold her back from opportunities overseas.

The United Kingdom and a policy shift

From Australia, Khattak applied for a job at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London. She was selected. But on her first day, her employer called her with unexpected news. “I was a Pakistani working in a park, EPA. And I applied for the scholarship. I went on scholarship. But from there, I thought I should resign from the government and explore a bit in other places,” she recalls. When the Foreign Office discovered she was Pakistani, not Australian, they said hiring was complicated on the commonwealth side. She negotiated her way in. She stayed in London for roughly nine to eleven years.

The turning point in Dubai

Then came Dubai. Khattak’s ex-boss asked her to consult on a training project. She nearly refused. She was packed to move to Canada, where she had already signed a contract to start on April seventh. But when she arrived in Dubai to help for a week, the employer made her an offer. Tax-free salary matching what she would earn in Canada. She did Istikhara, the Islamic decision-making prayer, and changed her mind.

Instead of Canada, she went to Dubai. She stayed there for seven years, building their accreditation system from scratch. “I had studied twelve accreditation bodies and visited the US, Canada, European countries. I had put all the knowledge in Pakistan and then I had put it in Dubai,” she explains. When the Pakistan post opened in 2015, she applied online. She was selected, and at fifty percent capacity, she split time between the two countries for years. Dubai understood her need to care for her aging mother in Pakistan.

What accreditation actually does

Muzamil asks what accreditation means in practice. Khattak’s answer is plain: it is about trust across borders. “Accreditation means trust. If a product from Pakistan is exported to any country, that country must trust that the product meets their requirements. Every country has an accreditation body. PNAC is Pakistan’s accreditation body. And WTO has two agreements with PNAC. One is technical barriers to trade. One is sanitary and phytosanitary measures,” she says.

The scale is enormous. Recently, Khattak read an OECD report showing four trillion dollars of global trade somehow linked to accreditation systems. Yet Pakistan’s market share is nearly zero. “When I see these reports, I think I should take Pakistan to this level,” she says. Her goal is to build accreditation capacity so Pakistani exports can compete on quality, not just price.

Halal as a gateway

Khattak is most proud of starting halal accreditation in Pakistan. “Pakistan was the first country in the world to start halal accreditation. Malaysia did it later,” she notes. Yet most Pakistanis do not know this. She is organizing an international halal conference on May twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh. “Many countries have promised. Turkey said they will bring a huge delegation. Our businessmen. Our government officials,” she says. The conference is, in her words, “a gateway to halal trade.” It is part trade show, part standards discussion, designed to open global halal markets to Pakistani manufacturers.

The quality problem at home

One concrete example matters. Khattak explains that fisheries in Pakistan had been exporting shrimp to Europe with excessive antibiotics. When European tests caught this, farmers discovered they had been using antibiotics as a preservative in the fish pond to keep stock alive during transport. This was happening at scale, silently. Pakistan’s accreditation system now requires certification.

She also points to an anecdote about automotive imported used from Japan. Pakistani buyers want the lowest price, not the safest car. So importers bring damaged vehicles that need collision repair, knowing the buyer cares only about price. Khattak argues that buyer behavior trains the supply chain. “As a society, unfortunately, we are price conscious before we are quality conscious,” she says.

Parental trust and ambition

Muzamil asks how Khattak escaped the defeatist mindset many Pakistanis carry abroad. She attributes it to her upbringing. “I never thought I was a woman. I never felt these things. I thought I was just like any one of them,” she says. Her father told her to be honest, work hard, and choose her own field. He gave encouragement, not doubt.

She tells a story from Australia. During Ramadan, her professor worried about her health, asking her to drink water in his office. She refused. “It’s not about drinking water. It’s a commitment that I have with my Allah that I will be fasting wherever I am, if I can,” she replies. The professor was moved. At thousands of kilometers from home with no one watching, Khattak kept her practice because her parents had trained her, not controlled her.

A message for young Pakistanis

Khattak’s closing advice is direct. Young Pakistanis have potential, but they often wait for circumstances to be perfect. She mentors young people constantly. When one computer science graduate asked about freelancing, Khattak was blunt. “You graduated from a top university. You have top CGPA. Your final year project was cutting edge. You applied to IBM, Teradata, Systems Limited. Why are you not trusting yourself?” The girl said her parents did not believe she could get hired. Khattak pushed back. “If you don’t trust your child, why did you send them to university in the first place? Whom would you trust?” she asks.

“I believe that Pakistanis are a selected group for Allah,” Khattak reflects. “There are challenges, but whoever is a selected group is always going through tests. We have to work hard, we have to excel in every field. Only we have to take this challenge and make it happen. We can do it.”

She concludes with a simple rule: “Everyone can do it, every job can do it. Only, he has no reward, and he has to work on it.”