Women community members started Potohar Organization for Development Advocacy (PODA) in 2003 in the Potohar region of Pakistan. Locally, the word PODA means "a new plant" or "a new beginning." As a community-based women’s organization, PODA was created to respond to the harsh realities of rampant gender discrimination in Pakistan and resulting poverty and violence that uniquely, and especially, impact women each day. PODA’s human rights-based programs ultimately seek to radically transform the social and cultural norms that oppress women and girls by blocking them from educational and economic opportunities and from finding their own truths about their spiritual relationship to their religion.

Historically, the voices of rural Muslim women have not been included in the faith-based feminism discourse locally and globally because of their isolation due to geography and men’s control over women’s access to knowledge, travel and opportunities to connect with their sisters at home or abroad. PODA ensures that rural women involved with the project to host five interconnected workshops benefiting 100 Muslim women in rural Pakistanare are provided with the opportunity to meet with their sisters from other countries where women belonging to various faiths are using their spiritual identity as a source of equality, liberation and empowerment. In turn, women around the world can begin to understand the perspectives of their sisters in rural Pakistan.