Bank a Book for TCF children with Coca-Cola

Karachi Literature Festival (KLF) is around the corner and the city is buzzing with excitement. Over the years, the Festival has established its popularity amongst the Karachi crowds and has become an event not to miss. Apart from promoting literature, an important aspect of intellectual growth, here’s one more reason why we think you are going to enjoy being there.

This year Coca-Cola has launched a new initiative at the KLF called Coke Bank a Book.

What a creative idea!

Coca-Cola will place its unused coolers, refurbished to be used as bookshelves, at the KLF asking people to donate books in them for TCF libraries.

These books will then be sold to raise funds for TCF school libraries with books relevant to TCF curriculum, medium of instruction and standards. In return, the donor will receive a free drink from Coca-Cola!

Tweet, tweet and what a buzz

Twitter has been buzzing with #CokeBankaBook. The hashtag has been picked up by book-lovers, education-supporters, TCF-believers and Coke-fans.

Official hashtags for this activity are #CokeBankABook and #CokeKLF2015. You too can join the conversation!

Books are the best gifts one can give. Share your old books with @TCFPak kids through #CokeBankABook happening at KLF pic.twitter.com/1K0UvZ9klx — Zoii (@zoya_altaf) February 3, 2015

The Karachi Literature Festival 2015 just got better! Way to go @cokePk once again for a brilliant idea! #CokeBankABook #CokeKLF2015 — Adil (@aurAdil) February 4, 2015

Fantastic initiative: Donate books 2 @TCFPak v #CokeBankABook @ #CokeKLF2015 pic.twitter.com/Aj3pp2bg6U Pls encourage others to donate as well — Ayesha Tammy Haq (@tammyhaq) February 1, 2015

Coca-Cola Pakistan has been a valuable donor for TCF, previously sponsoring the complete construction of a TCF school in flood-affected Muzaffargarh district while bearing all operational costs of the campus since the last three years. With this activity at the KLF, they are hoping to raise valuable funds for TCF libraries.

So how can you join?

1. Visit the KLF this year at Beach Luxury Hotel from Feb 6^th to 8^th between 10 am and 10 pm.
2. Check out the Coca-Cola Banks and donate a book or more and take a selfie.
3. Send us a tweet, something like “Just donated books to @TCFPak via #CokeKLF2015 and feeling very proud” and attach your selfie if you like 🙂

Here’s a final tip for the KLF attendees:

All tweets, with the hashtag #CokeKLF2015 will show up on a Twitter Wall set up by Coke at the KLF venue.  If you tweet with the hashtag #CokeKLF2015, about education and the deserving children of Pakistan, you’ll be sharing a valuable reminder with the attendees of the KLF and doing the cause a huge favour!

This father-son duo inspired over $3.1m in donations

Note: The following article has originally been published on NBCNews.com and was contributed by their staff writer Erik Ortiz with the help of Amjad Noorani and David Gardner (of TCF-USA) as a

Babar Suleman, 58, and son Haris, 17 aboard their journey around the world

final tribute to the father-son duo who sacrificed their lives in a journey to raise funds for the education of children in Pakistan

Teen Pilot and Dad Killed in Fatal Flight ‘Inspire’ Donors to Give $3.1M – NBC News

When 17-year-old pilot Haris Suleman and his dad, Babar, charted their adventure around the world in the hopes of setting a record, their supporters never imagined it would end in heartbreak. The pair’s single-engine plane crashed after takeoff from an airport in American Samoa as they neared the last leg of their journey in July. Rescuers retrieved Haris’ body from the wreckage in the South Pacific Ocean. Babar was never found.

But out of tragedy has been a wealth of generosity. The Sulemans had already earned about half of the $1 million they were trying to raise for Pakistani schools by completing their flight. Since the crash, donations have continued to pour in, and recently topped a staggering $3.1 million, family members in Plainfield, Indiana, told NBC News.

“In the aftermath of the accident, we saw how they were able to inspire,” said Babar’s daughter, Hiba Suleman.

Read the full article on NBCNews.com here

Background:

Earlier in the year, Haris, 17 was awarded the Sitara-i-Imtiaz (Star of Excellence) in Pakistan in honor of his courageous attempt to set the record for a worthy cause. The Sitara-i-Imtiaz is Pakistan’s 3rd highest award granted by the President of Pakistan. The 17-year old son was on the final leg of his brave attempt t to become the youngest ever pilot-in-command to fly around the globe in 30 days when his plane crashed off the coast of American Samoa on July 22, 2014.

TCF and the students it supports are eternally grateful for the sacrifice Haris and his father have made. You too can contribute to their legacy. 

This is something every girl needs

The following post has been submitted by a TCF volunteer, Durraiz Vazeer, in recognition of the International Day of Girl Child. Durraiz is currently completing his BSc in Economics, Politics and Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin in Canada.  ***

International Day of the Girl Child, a globally recognised day declared by the United Nations celebrated on the 11^th October, 2012. This day supports opportunities for girls, and increases awareness of gender disparities faced by girls worldwide. varying from access to education, nutrition, legal rights, medical care, and protection from discrimination, violence and child marriage.

Significance of this day is associated to different parts of the world, which includes a large part of Sub-Saharan Africa, and South and West Asia. Coherently, a country where this day might not be observed in great popularity but is of great significance is, Pakistan.

Pakistan foresees a mountain of challenges, most of which are intertwined with a lack of well-grounded structure of education for the poverty-stricken. If we dig a little deeper into this problem, naive cultural and social norms play a big part in the lack of education amongst the poor. “My son? Yes, he can study. He’ll be financially helpful once he starts working” What about your daughter? “She does not need to study; she is going to get married eventually.” Unfortunately, this is the ideal way of life for the one already deprived of education.

According to UNESCO’s report on Pakistan’s educational system, female youth (aged 15 to 24 years) faces a literacy rate of a staggering 53% compared to a 77% amongst the male youth.   If we start pointing fingers on whose fault it is, it will take awhile.

But, who addresses this dire problem of education then?

This is when The Citizens Foundation comes in to help the country in these times of educational turmoil. TCF is a non-profit organization initiated by a few concerned citizens in 1995. But, what does TCF want? It’s vision is to diffuse schools in societies where people never saw the face of a school. To date, there are 1000 schools and the student enrolment in these schools has risen to a remarkable 145,000 students.

A lot of other organizations have tried to pursue such goals/ Then how has TCF distinguished itself from the rest?

They have the largest network of a non-profit in Pakistan. Regardless of this obvious success, the management of TCF has come up with a well thought plan to tackle social and cultural barriers in remote areas. During the initial stages of TCF when enrolment first started for the school, a concerned mother came and spoke to Mr. Mushtaq Chappra (Chairman TCF). She said, “I am ready to send my daughter to school but only on one condition – if there are only female teachers in the school.”

Simple enough, right? This much uncomplicated idea became the core foundation of TCF’s policy and as of 2014, there are 7700 teachers teaching at the 1000 schools, all females. It is also TCF’s policy to ensure a 50% female ratio in any given class room.

Luckily, this isn’t the end.TCF also has an adult literacy programme called the Aagahi programme. This programme targets women specifically, and basic Mathematics and Urdu is taught in this programme. There’s still a long way to go. It would only take a little bit of our precious time and money to spread the word and contribute towards this noble cause.

Read more success stories of TCF students

Education Will Make Pakistan’s Youth an Asset

This post originally appeared in the HuffingtonPost written by Los-Angeles based freelance journalist David Gardner for The Citizens Foundation

Imagine sending your children to school and there are no teachers.

You might go to the principal’s office to see what’s going on and to ask when the staff is likely to return. But the principal is not there either.

When you complain to the local education authorities they promise faithfully that the teachers will be back. While you’re at it, you mention that none of the toilets at the school work and that there’s no water for the kids to drink. There may not even be any chairs or desks. Or books.

In the U.S. you’d be expecting to wake up about now. You’d realize it was all just an unpleasant dream and walk your children to their nice school complete with teachers, books, desks and working toilets.

But if you were a parent with children in the public school system in Pakistan, you’d never wake from the nightmare.

There are said to be 25,000 “ghost schools” in Pakistan. The teachers all get paid. They just don’t see the need to turn up. They don’t go to school, so the kids don’t either. The result is one of the highest illiteracy rates in the world.

With a population approaching 200 million, Pakistan is the sixth most populous country in the world, but about 54 million are illiterate. While national statistics report that 70 percent of children are enrolled in in primary education, 50 percent drop out before reaching the fifth grade.

According to UNESCO’s 2014 report on the state of global primary education,Pakistan has nearly 5.5 million children out of school, the second highest number in the world after Nigeria.

If you have a daughter in Pakistan, the odds are stacked against her going to school at all, especially if you’re living in a poor urban slum or a rural area. There remain huge disparities in the levels of literacy between the sexes.

You can’t blame the children. The Citizens Foundation (TCF), a non-profit that relies almost exclusively on donations from Pakistani and expat supporters in the U.S. and other countries, runs 1,000 quality schools in the country’s worst slums and neglected rural areas. TCF has a long waiting list of parents desperate to get their kids educated.

I recently spent a week visiting TCF schools in Karachi. Immediately outside the school walls, there’s abject poverty. Inside the school gates, there are pristine classrooms, computer labs and spotless washrooms. Drinking water is provided to ensure that no child goes thirsty.

This sanctuary could be a snapshot from any classroom in the world — happy children hanging on their teacher’s every word, immune to the stresses of the world outside.

Now working in 100 towns and cities across Pakistan, TCF strives to maintain an equivalent enrollment of girls and boys. This is no mean feat in a nation that has marginalized women even as it elected Benazir Bhutto its prime minister, a height yet to be achieved by an American woman. To sustain this gender ratio, TCF has an all-female faculty, because parents are more likely to send their daughters to schools where the teachers are women.

TCF schools have succeeded where others have failed because they’ve won the support of communities that have been forgotten and abandoned by the state.

On October 8, TCF in partnership with the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington D.C., co-hosted a conference titled “Pakistan’s Biggest Challenge: Turning Around a Broken Education System”, bringing together some of the best minds in education from around the world.

A range of solutions were on offer. Former Pakistani Finance Minister Shahid Javed Burki’s recommended that education reformers not waste their efforts expecting the corruption-ridden public system to mend its ways any time soon, and to instead focus on the private education sector. Meanwhile the Punjab Education Initiative reported on its success in sending an extra 1.5 million children back to public school as a workable model for the other provinces. Others proposed a massive investment in eLearning, and learning kiosks on every street corner.

Education reform campaigner Dr. Irfan Muzaffar sees a future in the private sector “adoption” of public schools, just as long as they remain free to all. TCF Chairman and co-founder Mushtaq Chhapra said the foundation is sharing the hard-won lessons it learned in the years since opening its first schools in 1995 with public and private educators, with the goal of helping millions more children.

A second conference is being planned for February 2015 in partnership with University of California, Berkeley’s Pakistan Initiative.

These are major steps in the process of reform. Pakistan’s sizable youth population could be the nation’s greatest asset — or its biggest liability. It is in all of our best interests to make sure they get the education they need to make the right choices.

TCF is participating in the worldwide Skoll Challenge. Donate to TCF via this link and help us stay on top of the Challenge in order to win the reward. 

Let’s Fix Pakistan’s Broken Education System

  

Pakistan faces a multitude of serious challenges, many of them connected to the lack of a viable education system for its poor masses. Widespread illiteracy and dismal pedagogical standards are overwhelming problems.

Well-meaning but largely symbolic actions – such as a recent constitutional amendment which mandates free primary and secondary education, along with education reform task forces and new education policies – have produced no real change. Millions of school age children are unable to access affordable schooling. This provides fertile ground for religious extremism and the radicalization of the youth.

A recent report by the International Crisis Group, ‘Education Reform in Pakistan’, gives a comprehensive and detailed picture of this dire situation. The report points to gender disparities, differences in access to education between urban and rural areas, and the fact that nine million Pakistani children are not in school. Yet total government spending on education is stuck at 2 per cent of GDP, the lowest in South Asia. The report concludes that Pakistan is far from achieving the Millennium Development Goal of providing universal primary education by 2015.

For its part, The Citizens Foundation (TCF) has tried to address the problem. TCF has established 1,000 schools in urban slums and rural areas that provide quality education to 145,000 girls and boys from low-income families. We have developed an effective school management model, and exposed as a myth the belief that poor, uneducated parents do not want education for their children and will not send their girls to school. To the contrary, our system boasts near parity between the genders. All our 7,700 teachers are professionally trained women, a fact that further encourages the enrollment of girls.

Pakistan needs education reform at multiple levels — curriculum changes, better management, and an end to corruption and tolerance of teacher absenteeism, among myriad other problems. But there is low-hanging fruit that can be harvested first. We can achieve a lot through public-private partnerships (school adoption programs, for example), sharing simple ideas to improve the quality of education, and innovations in curriculum delivery and teacher training through technology.

It’s going to take a little help from our friends in the developed world, but we’re not asking for handouts. We ask for your support to overcome this menace of illiteracy and poverty so that our children can grow up as good citizens in a decent society free of violence and intolerance, and be ready to compete on the world market for the best jobs.

A major milestone was reached this year when TCF opened its thousandth school. On October 8, in partnership with Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC, we are co-hosting a conference on Pakistan’s broken education system, where we will bring together some of the best minds in education.  A second conference is being planned for February 2015 in partnership with University of California, Berkeley’s Pakistan Initiative. These are major steps in the process of reform. Please let us know how you would like to help.

Source: Thomson Reuters Foundation. http://one.trust.org/item/20140822210737-ixk2p

Education is the Vaccine for Violence – Edward James Olmos

Today is International Women’s Day for Peace and Disarmament (IWDPD). May 24^th as IWDPD began in Europe in the early 1980s, when hundreds of thousands of women organised against nuclear weapons and the arms race. The day was created by women, for women.

Over the years activities have taken place all over the world. Global activities this year range from workshops in Bangladesh to film screenings in Democratic Republic of Congo. That’s just the ones we know about, there is so much more that is unsung being done by women in the pursuit of peace.

A day like this is significant for many of reasons. It exists to pay tribute to the important work of women peace activists. Women who work in difficult environments as agents of change for peace in their communities. Millions more than we realise, many don’t even know the scale of their own contribution to change in their communities. 

Across both the developed and developing world it is women that build and rebuild communities. It is mums, sisters, grandmothers and aunts that bring recovery and change to communities.

 We knew this at TCF when we set up almost twenty years ago. For us, women are at the heart of driving change in our communities. Change through education. Our all-female, (thousands strong) teaching staff and our female students (50% of our student body) are delivering stronger, safer and healthier communities for our future.

Don’t let this important day pass without note and support for the many women globally who strive for peace and development. One in ten out of school children in the world are in Pakistan, two thirds of them girls, we will continue for fight for peace and change with the pen as our sword.

TCF: 1,000 SCHOOLS, COUNTLESS OPPORTUNITIES

SHAZMA’S SMILE: THE NEW FACE OF EDUCATION IN PAKISTAN

The Citizens Foundation (TCF) is celebrating reaching its goal of 1000 schools across Pakistan. As a result of their work THIS is the face of the future for girls in some of the world’s most impoverished communities.

Shazma never dreamed of going to school. Her mother thought educating her was “useless.” It was enough that her brother should go to class so he could support the family.

Her gender tied her to a cycle of poverty she had no hope of escaping.

But the new TCF schools being built in Pakistan’s urban slums and poverty-stricken rural neighbourhoods insisted that girls had every bit as much right as boys to a quality education.

As a result, Shazma’s parents were persuaded to allow the little girl to go to school with her brother.

Now 8, she is top of her class and dreams of becoming a teacher.

Shazma is just one of 145,000 Pakistani children now attending these ground-breaking schools in 97 cities and towns in Pakistan’s poorest areas.

What began as just five schools in Karachi in 1995 has reached, 1000 this month, a milestone few people ever thought TCF – the non-profit organization behind Pakistan’s quiet education revolution – stood a chance of achieving, particularly as a considerable number of the schools are in regions heavily influenced by the fiercely fundamentalist Taliban.

They said it couldn’t be done. How could private citizens succeed where the government had failed? It would be too expensive, too ambitious. Parents would never allow their daughters to attend schools with boys.

But the doubters were proved wrong.

In each of the 1,000 TCF schools, every teacher, every principal, is a woman, a policy the founders insisted upon so that parents would feel more comfortable about sending their daughters to lessons. Every classroom strives to hold as many girls as boys.

Despite her tough upbringing in the town of Dadu in the Sindh province, Shazma is one of the lucky ones.

There are more than 240,000 public schools in Pakistan, many of them so badly run they don’t even have toilets or electricity let alone desks and computers. In many of them, the “ghost” teachers don’t bother showing up. Consequently neither do the kids.

TCF schools boast clean, working toilets. They have fresh drinking water. They have electricity. There are books and computers and teachers who believe in their pupils.

Perhaps better than all of those things, these children have the opportunity – the only one they are ever likely to get – to drag themselves out of the cycle of work and despair that is all that many of their parents have ever known.

Education can do that.

1,000 schools may only be a start – but the milestone offers a very real hope for girls, for the disadvantaged, for the invisible victims the world fails to see when it thinks of Pakistan.

Abdus Salam- The story of his life!

TCF Student, Abdus Salam is a dreamy, young boy. He believes that hard work and determination can make his dreams a reality!