My name is Sheeba and I am born and raised in Denmark. I have a Masters degree in IT and I am working as a Software Engineer for more than 20 years. My parents are from Pakistan, so that is my ethnic background.

I am brough up speaking two main languages: Urdu and Danish- Urdu being my heritage language and my religion is Islam.

I really believe that it is a gift for children to learn their heritage language, it is part of their roots and forms their identity and more so it can improve the communication and bond with their grandparents and the extended family “back home”.

My mother had a strong passion to teach her children their native language, and she did a lot to keep us enggaged with the traditions and cultural events too. Mother tongue is part of the culture, and so following the cultural traditions, for example, wearing the traditional dresses from Pakistan or serving the yummi traditional Pakistani spicy food, gave us a very thorough “education” in using the Mother tongue, but moreso it embedded the same passion to preserve and pass on the culture and language to my three daughters.

It is my perception, that more and more families, who have ethnic roots different from the country they are living in, wish to preserve their cultural heritage, including native language/mother tongue for example Arabic or Urdu. The mother tongue is the language in which our mothers sang us lullabies and communicated their love to us,

But it is a challenge for multilingual parents to get their children to speak their native language, even though parents use the language at home.

To address this, me and my children decided to design and develop a toy, which exposes the child to their heritage language by saying everyday sentences or singing songs and telling stories including a glimpse of their culture and Sunnah, thereby motivating children to speak the language and getting inspired by morale stories. Moreso, we provide basic Islamic learning; from memorising dua and be able to perform muslim obligations to understanding Islam and how to apply it in daily life from a very young age. The favorite part of this concept is that all learning is happening, while the child is playing and having fun.

The content we develop is properly tested with children, do they understand it, is it exciting and fun, and usually it undergo iterations of changes, before finally making it available for download to our customers.

We launched the product in Denmark in 2021, and since then the demand for more content and more languages has increased and so within the first year we added languages Sindhi, Pashto, Turkish together with our Content Creators (see videos of Qecho Content Creators on Youtube).

In 2022 we are now launching in UK and we are in process of adding Gujrati, Bengali, Arabic, English, and Persian.

2022 – One year after the Launch

We launched Qecho in Denmark 1 year ago, 2021 January with Urdu and Danish. Since then we have participated in many events, where we have sold Qecho. We have developed more than +700 Qecho audio content and added many languages with help from our Content Creators.