Send 50 Pakistani child workers to high school

This report takes you through the journey of the star graduates of the Paid to Learn schools for working children across Pakistan. In 2010, with the support of our donors & well-wishers, we achieved the milestone of expanding our non-formal schooling project to include secondary education for the top students. To date, 400 students have started this journey of secondary education in private and government schools that they were placed in by our team.

The net enrolment of our graduates in this program is currently higher in girls than it is in boys. Students are studying in classes VI to X in Zindagi Trust cooperative private & government schools, an experience which can be both exciting and challenging, given the obstacles of adjusting to an environment where their classmates have been enrolled in formal education all their lives, a concept alien to them.

What is really encouraging about this project is the role of our children in their environment. In the monthly progress reports, their teachers have appreciated these children who have become role models for the rest of the children in their respective schools in terms of their behavior and attitude. Their teachers also appreciated our graduates due to their stand-out curiosity and desire to learn, as opposed to rote memorization and focus on exam scores, thanks to the formative assessment techniques used to assess student learning at Paid to Learn Schools.

We are thankful for the patronage of the project from our friends at GlobalGiving and donors like yourself. A note with a prayer for all our primary graduates studying in secondary classes: May your journey of secondary education be vibrant and full of colorful rainbows!

Tayyaba showed promise as a student from the day she started studying at one of our Paid to Learn schools, where working children get an accelerated course in primary education. She says she is blessed to have been given the opportunity to get an education and thanks Zindagi Trust for supporting her studies. But starting this journey wasn’t easy.

Tayyaba’s father has now been working as a ragman and scrap dealer in the Rawalpindi region for a long time. At the age of 4, Tayyaba showed an interest in going to school but her parents strictly forbade her from doing so and told her that studying in a school would remain only a dream. Luck wasn’t having any of this, so when the regional coordinators and field workers from our Rawalpindi team visited her neighbourhood for a student enrollment drive, they managed to convince her family to spare her from working for a few hours to join a school located conveniently close to her home.

We caught up with Tayyaba recently and she looked back at how she embarked on a mission to get an education.

“I belong to a Pukhtoon family, where girls are not allowed to go to school. I am the first in my family who went to school and opened the door for rest of the girls of my community, who later got permission to join school. It is a great achievement of Zindagi Trust’s academic team who motivated my family as well as other Pukhtoon families in that area to specially send their girls to a Zindagi Trust school.”

Tayyaba had a clear passion for education and took her studies seriously from the start, which showed in her performance at school. At her primary school graduation ceremony, where she was one of the top students in her class, she spoke about how the two-year program proved to be life-changing and shared her experiences with other Zindagi Trust students:

“Doing our best is challenging but it is always going to make a difference in our life’s journey!”

After graduating from our primary education program, Tayyaba qualified for our scholarship for the most promising graduates and was placed in the 6^th-grade of a mainstream private school, Al Huda Education System. She stood first in class in her very first year in a formal school setting and is now studying in the 7^th-grade – a great achievement which makes all her teachers at Zindagi Trust as well as her family extremely proud.

Tayyaba loves to read in her spare time. Her future plans involve teaching at the same Zindagi Trust school where she first got introduced to education as she has a passion to serve the children living in the slum she grew up in. She pays tribute to all her teachers for their guidance and says she appreciates the way they have been teaching children like herself.

She beams as she tells us how proud her family is of her good academic performance continuing into secondary school as well. She promises to always give her best to her studies and is committed to learning as much as she can.

Zindagi Trust wishes Tayyaba all the best!

Links:

• The Paid to Learn Program