Comment by Riaz Haq on June 22, 2019 at 4:57pm

Amjad Ali, #Karachi rickshaw driver, father of six daughters sending them all to school in #Pakistan. One of his daughter Muskan just won a scholarship to study at top #business school. #education #highereducation https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=2019062115073239

https://twitter.com/haqsmusings/status/1142580970215788544

In a country where many women are still discouraged from getting an education and are married off early, Amjad Ali, a father of six daughters, and a rickshaw driver, has broken the mould by sending his daughters to Karachi’s leading universities, reports Samaa TV.

“People often mocked and criticised me, saying that girls are bound to get married and move out and to stop wasting my hard-earned money on my daughters,” he said. 

But one of his daughters, Muskan, recently received a scholarship from the Institute of Business Administration, which is one of the top business schools in the country. “It was one of the happiest days of my life,” he said. “Be it a son or a daughter, the right to education is equal for all,” he believes.

Comment by Riaz Haq on May 12, 2021 at 7:19am

'Never imagined beyond my neighborhood': Taunton senior's journey from Haripur, #Pakistan to #Cornell. Spoke Urdu & Hindko but she was able to pick up English pretty quickly, becoming comfortable with it within her first year in #NewJersey https://www.tauntongazette.com/story/news/education/2021/05/11/taun... via @tauntontogo


Taunton High School senior MahNoor Abbas and her family immigrated to the United States from Pakistan to have access to better opportunities.

In September, 17-year-old Abbas will achieve that goal, attending Cornell University to study computer science.

"I never imagined beyond my neighborhood," she said. "But now I'm excited to be going. My family made sacrifices so I could do this, and it's paying off."

Abbas, grew up in a small town in Pakistan outside Haripur. In 2006, when she was still a small child, her father and two of her siblings moved to the U.S.

Abbas's family expected her mother, herself and two other siblings to be able to join them a year or so after her father immigrated, but because of the U.S. immigration system, they ended up waiting 10 years before being allowed to immigrate.

"[My mother] was the one there taking care of us and making sure we took advantage of better opportunities," she said.

One of those opportunities was moving from a public to private school, which Abbas was able to do in the fourth grade.

Finally, during Abbas's eighth grade year, she, her mother and her siblings joined her father in Taunton.

While Abbas was grateful to have her family united, moving to America was no cake walk. She said she quickly realized that the social norms were very different.

"People were much less concerned with doing things for others and their community," she said. "It was much more individualistic, like people were focused on getting ahead in terms of their own success."

At first, Abbas encountered a language barrier, but already speaking two other languages — Urdu and Hindko — she was able to pick up English pretty quickly, becoming comfortable with it within her first year in Taunton.

Abbas also encountered discrimination due to being Muslim, such as other high schoolers questioning whether it is a privilege or a right for her to wear a hijab in school.

Another issue has been people associating her religion with terrorism.

"People think it's ok to call it 'Islamic terrorism' — that's something I've had to correct people on," she said. "I don't think [terrorism] is something that should be associated with my religion. Those men think they are following the religion, but they aren't."

Comment by Riaz Haq on September 6, 2021 at 5:27pm

NETSOL’s Education Support Program Touching Lives

https://magazine.cxoforum.global/netsols-education-support-program-...

NETSOL’s Education Support Program (NESP) has proved to be a huge success after the company reported that it has hired 3 ambitious women who were the daughters of security guards working at NETSOL.

NETSOL has been actively involved in contributing to the education sector. The company has been recognized for its NESTOL Education Support Program (NESP) by PASHA Awards in 2019. The NESP Program is specifically designed to provide support to the children of underprivileged employees. The program covers almost 500 children who are working in NETSOL’s “Admin Support Function”. Moreover, the company makes sure that the children attend english-medium schools only. The students enrolled in the program can gain access to quality education from schools located all over Pakistan.

NETSOL’s effort to contribute to society has indeed bore fruit with the exciting news that three young females who are daughters of security guards have been hired in NETSOL’s IT department. The company stands true to its vision:

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 30, 2021 at 6:25pm

Congrats #ParagAgrawal! Now to all those “liberal” #Pakistanis bashing #Pakistan by invoking some of the worst #Islamophobic stereotypes of #Muslims as “terrorists”, here’s an uplifting story of a #Karachi slum girl who’s now a neurology resident in #US. https://www.newsweek.com/slums-pakistan-school-doctor-1640783

Dr. Sidra Saleem's story

I grew up in a very small urban slum, between New Karachi and Gulshan-e-Maymar in Karachi, Pakistan. These slums—called katchi abadis—are areas that are not recognized by the government and so they don't get access to healthcare, education and basic necessities. The houses are small, not well maintained and roads are not constructed properly so public transport doesn't service the area. Electricity is not available on any set schedule and we didn't have addresses to receive mail.

Our house had three rooms for myself and my four siblings, my parents and my grandparents, but there were people living in worse conditions around us. Some of our neighbours had up to 10 children and they lived in one room, all sleeping on the floor.

My father is from a very small village in central Pakistan but he migrated to our katchi abadi to work as a labourer and his monthly income was the equivalent of U.S. $200 a month. Our circumstances were difficult, $200 is nothing, so it was hard to make ends
meet and there was a constant struggle for basic necessities. We would have to think several times before buying a single item, and my family and I only bought new clothes on special occasions, once or twice a year. We never had the chance to dine out or go to malls. The whole world outside our neighborhood was a "different world" to us.
As a child, I had always wanted to be a doctor and in 6th grade I made the decision to pursue that goal. However, in the back of my mind I knew that the only way for me would be to get into a government funded medical school. Privately funded schools charged a lot, and I knew I wouldn't be able to afford it. But I knew I could work hard; that was in my hands.

When I was in grade 6 or 7, I also began tutoring other students and I continued doing that all the way through to the end of medical school. I didn't earn much, only $50-100 a month for up to four hours of tutoring a day. By 10th grade, when I was 15, all schools in the education system held exams for students. I was among the very top students, scoring around 90 percent in the exams.

That was one of the happiest days of my childhood, not only for me and my family but also for my teachers. It made all of us realize that I had a bright future ahead. I then received a scholarship from the State Bank of Pakistan and went to an intermediate college. Despite the college being far from my home, there was a contentment from knowing I didn't have to worry about finances.

However, the other students mostly came from very expensive private schools and had their own personal transport and personal tutors. It was difficult, because I was not able to participate in their conversations other than about school. That was the first time I really felt that life is unfair and harder for the poor. I remember I went home to talk with my old school teachers, and they encouraged me to make my comparisons based on intellect and hard work, not money. By the end of Grade 12, I ranked 24th out of over 10,000 students in Karachi.



But there aren't very many medical schools in Pakistan, and entry into them is competitive. And, out of thousands of students who apply, perhaps only a few hundred receive government scholarships. I was fortunate enough to be among the students who received a scholarship.

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 3, 2021 at 4:32pm

TCF Is Being Featured At Expo 2020 Dubai’s Global Best Practice Programme

https://www.tcf.org.pk/2021/11/tcf-expo-2020-dubai-global-best-prac...

TCF started with a dream to educate the most vulnerable children of Pakistan, thus enabling them to create a better future for themselves, and become agents of positive change. While this dream started with five schools, today TCF’s school network is spread across Pakistan, with 1,687 schools present in even the most remote areas of the country.

TCF at Expo 2020 Dubai
As a testament to TCF’s promise to provide quality education, TCF has been selected as one of the top 25 projects worldwide to be showcased at the Expo 2020 Dubai’s Global Best Practice Programme, ‘Small Steps, Big Leaps’, Solutions for Sustainable Impact. TCF was selected after a review of 1,175 applicant programmes from 141 countries by an international committee.

The Global Best Practice Programme is an initiative that recognises organisations from around the world that have provided tangible, adaptable and scalable solutions to the world’s biggest challenges. It sheds light on projects for global visibility and knowledge that are in line with the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, and have localised the Global Agenda in their countries, communities, neighbourhoods and households to ensure that no one is left behind. Amongst the five key topics the programme focuses on – including inclusive and sustainable service delivery, water and energy security, resilient habitats, and livelihoods and enterprise development – TCF has been selected in the social development category for its unique educational model in Pakistan.

The Global Best Practice Programme will highlight TCF from 2nd Dec 2021 – 2nd Jan 2022 as one of the successful and impactful solutions in the Best Practice Area (BPA) at Expo 2020 Dubai. The Best Practice Area (BPA) will be located in the Opportunity Pavilion next to the UN Hub at Expo 2020 Dubai.

The Best Practice Area (BPA) will be a multifunctional exhibition and programming space housed within the Opportunity Pavilion, where different development best practices will be showcased and shared, thus modelling the idea of an “interactive hub” as a reflection of Expo’s overall theme – Connecting Minds, Creating the Future.

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 7, 2021 at 10:52am

ASER Report Findings:

https://www.thenews.com.pk/print/913975-educational-outcomes

These poor living conditions (in urban slums) are also reflected in the delivery of education. Around 20 percent of the urban slums surveyed did not have a government school. The majority of children living in the surveyed urban slums were enrolled in private schools (59 percent) that include madrassahs (eight percent) and non-formal education providers (one percent) and the remaining children (41 percent) were enrolled in government schools. Enrolment is higher in the 5-10 age bracket, while one in three children of 16-year-old is out of school.

There are also inter-district variations. Government school enrolment is higher in Lahore (59 percent) while private school enrolment is higher in Korangi, Karachi (again 59 percent). In terms of madrassah enrolment, it varies between two and three percent in Lahore, Malir, and Korangi, and it is 24 percent in Karachi-West where one in four children is studying in a madrassah.

Girls relatively fall behind in terms of enrolment. With regard to evaluating learning outcomes, children studying in urban slums lag behind the ASER assessment in 2019 in these very same districts conducted as part of the ASER survey. However, urban slums of these four districts are being assessed systematically for the first time in this pilot study.

According to the report, “In 2019, learning outcomes (5-16 year old) gathered in the same four districts revealed Urdu/Sindhi story reading at 46 percent, while in 2021 the four district katchi abadis, story reading in Urdu/Sindhi is 35 percent. For two-digit division in 2019, 41 percent children were competent, while in katchi abadis in 2021, it is 26 percent; in 2019, 46 percent children could read sentences in English, but in katchi abadis in 2021, 37 percent children can read English sentences. The challenges can be interrogated by gender, institution, mother tongue, psychosocial well-being etc.”

Despite challenges, girls performed relatively better in numeracy and literacy in urban slums. Similarly, children studying in private schools showed relatively better results than those studying in government schools. It is again something that has already been highlighted by me in an article ‘Private education’ (October 31) published on these pages. Madrassah students’ educational outcomes were extremely poor. Only 7.4 percent could read a story in Urdu/Sindhi, 10 percent could read sentences in English, and 4.4 percent of more than 400 madrassah students (5-16 years old) who were assessed as part of the pilot study could solve division problems.

The other important factors are learning in the mother tongue, household wealth, parents’ – particularly mother’s – education, technology availability and usage that are positively correlated with higher learning outcomes of children. The report also states that psychosocial well-being is important, and as someone who has always believed and practised in never ever giving up and always having a good fight with a positive frame of mind no matter how difficult and arduous circumstances might be at some point in one’s life, one sees the wisdom in including this variable in the report while assessing children’s well-being.

Another positive finding of the report is that technology and internet usage is prevalent in the majority of houses in urban slums. Roughly 80 percent of the households have mobile phones – 63 percent even have smartphones – and 21 percent have laptops/computers. In total, one-third of the participating households (33 percent) stated that they use the internet. This shows that there is tremendous potential for web-based technology-oriented learning and livelihoods solutions.

Comment by Riaz Haq on April 16, 2023 at 8:01am

Meet Ayesha Siddiqui, a TCF Alumna studying at the prestigious Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS)!

Despite cultural barriers and opposition from the community in her village (Bhai Pheru, Punjab), her father, a daily wage laborer and her mother, a house help, stood by her side and encouraged her to pursue her dreams!


https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:70531400607323...

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Meet Ayesha Siddiqui, a TCF Alumna studying at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS)! Ayesha's journey from Bhai Pheru Village to LUMS was anything but easy. But despite cultural barriers and opposition from her community, her father, a daily wager and her mother, a house help, stood by her side and encouraged her to pursue her dreams!

https://business.facebook.com/citizensfoundationcanada/photos/a.375...

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 11, 2023 at 10:40am

The education spending multiplier: Evidence from schools in Pakistan
Tahir Andrabi Natalie Bau Jishnu Das Naureen Karachiwalla Asim Ijaz Khwaja / 11 Jun 2023

https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/education-spending-multiplier-eviden...


Private schools in Pakistan, as in many other countries, are financed almost entirely through school fees. Therefore, when public schools improve, private schools must also improve or risk losing valuable revenue as parents opt for public schools. This column examines the effect of a public school grants programme in rural Pakistan and estimates the ‘education multiplier’ for the effect of public funding on private sector school quality. The authors find that grants given to public schools increase test scores in both public and private schools as a result of increased competition.

In the past, policymakers worried that there were not enough schools for children in low- and middle-income countries. But today, millions of children in these countries live in villages or neighbourhoods where they can choose from multiple public or private schools. Figure 1, for instance, shows a typical village in the Learning and Educational Achievement in Pakistan Schools (LEAPS) study. The village takes 20 minutes to cross on foot, but has five private and two public schools. The average village in the LEAPS sample has 7.3 schools, and 60 to 70% of the rural population in Punjab (Pakistan’s largest province) lives in such environments. If we include cities, that fraction rises to more than 90%.

That is a big deal for public policy, which has historically failed to account for the relationship between public policy and the private sector in education.

To see why, note that private schools in Pakistan, like in many other countries, are financed almost entirely through school fees, which parents must be willing to pay. Therefore, when public schools improve, private schools must respond, or face the risk of losing valuable revenue as children opt to attend improved public schools. Thus, understanding the total impact of any programme - even those targeted purely to public schools - requires considering its effect on all other schools in the market, not just on the school where the intervention was implemented, as accounting for the total effects can lead to very different conclusions about effectiveness. Our new paper (Andrabi et al. 2023) measures the effect of a public school grants programme in rural Pakistan and estimates the ‘education multiplier’ for the effect of public funding on private sector school quality.

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 11, 2023 at 10:43am

The education spending multiplier: Evidence from schools in Pakistan
Tahir Andrabi Natalie Bau Jishnu Das Naureen Karachiwalla Asim Ijaz Khwaja / 11 Jun 2023

https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/education-spending-multiplier-eviden...



The Evaluation
Our evaluation has three key features: the environment, the intervention, and the data.

Environment: We worked in 80 villages with closed education markets, where 90% of the children in the village attend schools in the village, and 90% of the enrolment in the schools comes from the village itself. Closed markets allow us to trace the full impact of public school improvements on other schools without getting into tricky questions of determining which private schools compete with treated public schools.
Intervention: Our intervention was a grants programme where money was given to public schools for necessary investments determined by a newly constituted school council in collaboration with an NGO. The programme was allocated to randomly selected villages, and the research team had zero contact with the government, both in the targeting of schools within villages and the implementation of the scheme, allowing us to identify the effects of the policy as it would be implemented by the government in practice.
Data: We collected data from all schools in these villages between 2003 and 2011 as part of the LEAPS study. We tested more than 70,000 children, interviewed more than 4,000 school-owners and teachers, and collected detailed information on the households of the tested children. We also gathered information about which schools exited and entered the market over these eight years and how their enrolments changed over this period.
Five years after the programme started in 2006, public schools in treated villages had received an additional PKR 492,020 in funding compared to those in control villages. This amount translates into a 42% increase over the funding that control schools received in this period and 29% of median annual public-school expenditures (inclusive of teacher salaries). Consistent with the new guidelines, we also find that the composition of school councils became more socioeconomically inclusive and representative of the parent body, and the number of school council meetings increased.

Test scores increase in public and private schools
We then show that the programme causally increased aggregate test scores in treated villages by 0.2 standard deviations. This aggregate increase reflects, first, an increase in test scores of 0.2 standard deviations among public schools. Strikingly, through the education multiplier, it also reflects an increase in test scores of 0.2 standard deviations among private schools. Furthermore, among private schools, test score improvements were higher in schools that faced stronger competitive pressures. Consistent with models of ‘horizontal differentiation’, private schools located closer to public schools saw larger test score increases. Consistent with models of ‘vertical differentiation,” private schools located in villages with higher-quality public schools at the beginning of the programme improved the most, even though there was no heterogeneity in the impact of the treatment on public schools themselves by baseline test scores.

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 11, 2023 at 10:44am

The education spending multiplier: Evidence from schools in Pakistan
Tahir Andrabi Natalie Bau Jishnu Das Naureen Karachiwalla Asim Ijaz Khwaja / 11 Jun 2023

https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/education-spending-multiplier-eviden...


Private school fees and their entry or exit into the schooling market are not affected
Interestingly, we do not find evidence of a treatment effect on private school fees, exits (or entries) or market shares - by 2011, the market share of private schools was the same in treatment and control villages. The fact that market share did not change does not mean that parents do not respond to or observe improvements in school quality. Rather, enrolment shares in 2011 are an equilibrium outcome following quality changes in both sectors.

Cost-effectiveness
Using standard methods from the literature (Dhaliwal et al. 2013), we then show that the intervention increased test scores in public schools by 1.18 standard deviations for every US$100 in additional spending. But once we factor in improvement in private schools as well, cost-effectiveness increases by 85% to 2.18 standard deviations for every $100 in additional public funding, putting the programme among a small group of highly cost-effective interventions (see Evans and Yuan 2022). Finally, the education multiplier also had fundamental implications for how programmes should be targeted. We show that regardless of whether the government is interested in maximising test score gains from the programme or is interested both in equity and gains, accounting for the education multiplier changes the optimal geographical targeting and distribution of grants across villages.

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