The Education Program Background
Although KASB Foundation has already been involved with the promotion of education, the initiative to educate the children from FATA region was taken in view of the very large forced influx of people from that area because of the ever increasing violence that has disturbed the very fabric of society. Unfortunately, with entire families being forced to move out to safer places, this pattern has not yet changed and we continue to witness the forced migration of FATA families because of the increasingly unlivable conditions in some areas there.
The influx of these people which includes entire families has been to all the major cities in Pakistan. The majority of people amongst them who are not well off stay with friends and relatives and take up whatever unskilled work they can find to make a living. Once they settle down and start earning basic wages, they build temporary shanty homes or take up houses at the cheapest possible rents in the low class areas, most of which are on the outskirts of Karachi city. An approximate breakdown of these internally displaced families is that only 2% are well off and live reasonably well while the remaining a98% families are poor and face severe humanitarian problems.
As these families have difficulties in earning a decent livelihood, the education of their children becomes unaffordable and they are forced to either take up child-labour work or forced to remain grow up uneducated in an atmosphere that becomes a natural breeding ground for all ills and become easy prey for extremist forces to negatively influence them.
Unfortunately, the disastrous floods which hit Pakistan and parts of FATA region further aggravated the internally displaced people situation and forced many families who had lost everything to seek refuge where ever possible, including in Karachi to further increase the problems of the FATA people and particularly the FATA children.
To enable these children to become productive members of society, KASB Foundation had taken the initiative to create an atmosphere where opportunities would exist for these children to be constructively engaged by educating them. This effort was to create an immediate and direct impact not only on the children, but also on their families and the environment in which they lived to have some semblance of normalcy and hope for an eventual better future.
Importantly, the investment being made to educate these FATA children would bear the fruit in the form of a positive influence when they someday return back to their homes, where they would be considered as natural leaders who would lead their communities to a better way of life and encourage other children to also contemplate education as the tool for bettering their lives also.
The Methodology
To implement the FATA Children Education Program, besides the KASB Foundation team members, two full time Educations Managers have been appointed, under whose coordination and supervision the program is executed with progress being discussed with the management of our foundation.
An important point to note is that for the success of this program, it was necessary to have a “Pusto” (local dialect of the FATA region) Education Manager, who was appointed at the very onset of this important program. The task of effective interaction with these internally displaced families become easier through him, as during the initial stages of the program there was a lot of difficulty in communicating with such families as they were hesitant about volunteering information about themselves and suspected that this was being done for reasons other then the provision of education for their children.
At the beginning of the FATA Children Education Program, it was difficult to win the trust and confidence of these displaced families and to make them understand that there children would go to schools that were close to their homes and all their fees, books, stationery, uniform, shoes would be paid for by our KASB Foundation with the added incentive of even giving all the children a monthly stipend. Eventually, the trust of these families was slowly won and after the enrollment of a few students to begin with, this number increased to in between the period of March 2010 and May 2010 to 100 students. Thereafter, this number has increased to a total of 207 students whose education is now being overseen by our foundation and God willing, this number will gradually be increased to a milestone figure of 1,000 in the first stage of the program; and later on enhanced every further.
The Selection Criteria
The selection criteria is based on the meetings with the elderly family members of FATA families and evaluating whether they can afford to educate their children or not. Based on the combined earnings of these families and after meeting and assessing the interest levels of the children, support is provided by taking the children for enrollment in selected schools that are close to their residences.
An important observation that needs to be highlighted is that these FATA children are divided in two groups. One group is that which has children who were already going to school in FATA region prior to their forced migration to far away places and the second group is of those children who were never encouraged to go to schools before. Therefore, the children who have attained some levels of education are after the school tests enrolled in appropriate classes, while the children who never before attended school have to be enrolled in kindergarten or class 1, although at times they are more grownup in comparison to other students.
Through regular visits to the schools, the progress of the children is regulated and outdoor visits to places of interests, picnics and get-to-gathers are also arranged for them so as to make them realize that there is an even better world that they can also live in, provided they make efforts to educate themselves for a more productive and successful life.