Send 50 Pakistani child workers to high school

Amna was six when she and her two sisters lost their mother. Her father was a driver who worked from 7 in the morning to 9 at night. There was nobody else at home to look after the girls, so their maternal aunt taught Amna how to do the household chores. She also taught Amna how to do embroidery on scarves, in an effort to enable her to support her father's meagre income from home. She rose to the occasion, demonstrating a sense of responsibility beyond her age and soon become an key contributor to her family.

Growing up in poverty, her father struggled to enrol her in school, so she joined Zindagi Trust's Paid to Learn programme, which provides an accelerated primary school education to urban working children. Always a committed student, she graduated at the top of her class and qualified for the trust's Secondary School scholarship, through which she was placed in a private school where she is now studying in the 7th grade.

Amna is a regular and conscientious student, keeping her teachers happy with her academic performance. Having seen life's struggles up close at a raw age, she seeks out the most from her school experience by participating actively in co-curricular and extra-curricular activities. She has won prizes in speech competitions and for tableau performances.

She says that her family's hard times have taught her how move on in life and made her realize her potential.

"We curse adversity because it ruins our lives but it also shows us ways to come out of it stronger," she says, words you wouldn't expect from a seventh-grader. She wants to run a vocational training centre at home, so others like herself and her family can find a path out of poverty.

Amna, and other star graduates of Zindagi Trust's primary education programme for working children in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad have truly inspirational stories of  struggle both at school and at their workplace or home, being burdened with the responsibility of supporting their family income as children.  Your support helps make them aware of their rights as children, as workers and as citizens and, most of all, empowers them as responsible future citizens of Pakistan. We would like to thank you for your tremendous support and hope you will continue to donate to the programme to help sustain some transformations out of poverty and illiteracy.

Links:

• Zindagi Trust website