Focus on schools for underprivileged children

Sughran, 6, sits in her classroom with about 30 other children, a battered little pencil case, shaped like a guitar, protruding out of her breast pocket. "My father's a labourer," she muttered in a barely audible voice, fiddling with her pencil. "My mother stays at home and cooks our food," she told IRIN, smiling shyly while her class-mates broke into broad grins when they spotted the visitor's camera. Sughran, and dozens of children like her, who all come from poor families living in slums with barely enough income to sustain them on a day-to-day basis, studies at a Karachi primary school established and run by a non-profit organisation called The Citizens Foundation (TCF). The school has been built right in the heart of an urban slum, close to the Karachi airport, about half-an-hour's drive away from the city center. Enrolled children, often from backgrounds that include extreme poverty with cases, sometimes, that include domestic abuse, can easily walk to school where they find a custom-built environment providing not just education but the chance to find themselves as people. Formed in 1995 by a group of businessmen and industrialists, who decided to invest their money and time into reforming the lives of underprivileged children, TCF started out with five schools built in and around Karachi: all were based in slums, where conditions of extreme poverty and neglect existed. "They looked at all the different factors that affect development socially: a burgeoning population, poor sanitation, bad water and so on," Neelam Habib, TCF's manager for donor relations, told IRIN on the way to the school near the airport. "They decided that education was the one factor that would make the biggest difference. So they said: "Why don't we put our money where our mouth is?" she said, adding that the businessmen put in their own money, pooled in their resources and initially built five primary schools in different areas. "Now, eight years later, we have 140 schools countrywide. Every year, we add something like 40 more schools," Habib maintained, adding that the organisation's target was to have 1,000 schools, both primary and secondary, functioning by the end of the year 2005. "If you have the education system improved, everything else automatically connects to each other. That's what they decided: to make a difference at the grass-roots level and hope that over the next ten years, the next generation that comes out will automatically be equipped with a better decision-making power and at least some civic sense and some character to be good human beings," Habib explained. HUNGRY FOR LOVE "It's a great feeling. It feels as if we are actually doing something worthwhile with our lives," Fauzia Zaheer, the principal of the TCF primary school at Bhitaiabad, near the airport, told IRIN.

A class sits at attention

It was a different experience from teaching the children at private schools which she'd previously done, she said. "All these kids are hungry for love and attention. They get abused physically so much at home: the mother takes her frustration out on them, while the father usually takes his ire out on the entire family," she said, adding that she wasn't surprised that local children were often very enthusiastic about coming to school. "That's because they know they'll get attention here, that they'll be pampered to an extent. That's something they never experience at home," she stressed. "They actually come excitedly to school," Habib interjected, pointing out that, for the few hours the children spend in school, they tend to forget about their problems. "They come here, they belong here, they have their own books - it makes a great difference, you know, for them to have their own books; it's a sense of belonging they never have otherwise," she explained, adding that TCF also provides uniforms and a daily milk-and-cookie supplement to all the enrolled children. "If we give these kids just a little love, there are no better children than them," Zaheer said. The only problem teachers faced in this particular school, Zaheer said, was the language problem. "None of these children speak Urdu as their first language: some are Sindhi, some speak Baluch, but it all gets resolved as we go along," she said. CLUSTERS OF PRIMARIES Habib said TCF schools were always built according to a certain pattern. "For every primary school, we build on 1,000 sq. yards, she said, adding that the foundation first identifies a site, usually in a slum that has too many children or working children before purchasing a plot and building it in two phases with the ground portion coming up first. "Over the next five years, while these children are growing up, we add secondary schools to a cluster of three primaries. If there are three primary schools in an area, one secondary school (grades 6-10) is enough," she explained. Once they finished with the primary school - which has 30 children per class so even if you take a minimum of ten children from each class, keeping in mind the dropout rate - a secondary school class still has about 30 children, Habib said. All the schools have computer labs, as well as others for the three main scientific disciplines: chemistry, physics and biology, Habib said, adding that TCF had literally built 40 school units in the last 12 months. "There are 85 in Karachi and its surroundings. The rest are spread across the country and we have plans for another 50 to be built by April 2004 - all with the help of donors, whether they are corporate or otherwise," she explained. One running TCF school has approximately 200 children. So we have roughly 80,000 children studying in 140 schools countrywide. These are all the children of the slums of those areas, mostly self-earning children, or one of the many siblings in a household where the money is barely enough to sustain the family, Habib said. "We even encourage working children, children who work in tailor shops, embroidery shops, even those involved in fisheries," she explained.

With recess almost over, children line up for class again

The children would go and work on their trade for two hours early in the morning and then go to school. Others would come to school and then go to work in the afternoon. "So, basically they all supplement the household income. You have to remember: these are situations where households can accommodate up to ten people or just slightly less," Habib stressed. TEACHER TRAINING CENTRE Even TCF teachers have to undergo a special course before they are taken on. "We have our own training center, so we hire our own teachers and put them through the training, so that every school we run has a similar educational standard," Habib said. Teachers, who have been around for a while, are put through a refresher course and new teachers, who are hired a little before the academic year, are put through an eight-week training course, she said. "It's an all-female staff basically to put the girl child at ease," Habib said. TCF schools filled the gap between government and private schools, she explained. "While our schools are as good or better as any private school, the standard of our teachers is also very good," she said. And there is no such thing as fee education in TCS, Habib stressed. The small amounts required to pay for uniforms, books and the free dietary supplement are all paid for by the donor, 70 percent of the time, she added. "The idea is to be so flexible that any child who wants to be educated should be able to do so without any reservation," Habib said. "The idea is for them to use their own minds!"