Hum Aurtein and allied feminist collectives organized the inaugural Aurat March in Karachi and Lahore, creating a broad non-party feminist platform.
The Aurat March emerged from the organizing efforts of Hum Aurtein ('We Women'), a feminist collective, together with allied groups such as the Women Democratic Front and various university and labour-based feminist networks. On March 8, 2018, these groups coordinated the first Aurat March demonstrations in Karachi and Lahore.
Unlike earlier state-sanctioned or NGO-led women's day events, this platform was explicitly non-partisan and grassroots, deliberately avoiding affiliation with any single political party. Its founding demands spanned labour rights for domestic and informal workers, reproductive justice, protection from gender-based violence, and legal reform.
This organizational model — a loose coalition of feminist collectives rather than a single hierarchical organization — became the structural template for subsequent years' marches in other cities including Multan, Faisalabad, Hyderabad, Quetta, and Peshawar. It allowed local chapters to adapt the march's specific demands to regional contexts while retaining a shared feminist identity under the Aurat March banner.
The establishment of this platform is considered foundational to Pakistan's contemporary feminist movement, providing an enduring infrastructure for annual mobilization and cross-class, cross-ethnic feminist solidarity that had not previously existed at this scale in the country.