In November 2020 we launched a special month-long campaign in which we shone light on the work and lives of our colleagues and friends in partner organisations. Elie, Unaza and Pippa joined us as guest writers to reveal what their day-to-day work looks like as they mobilize various stakeholders for transformative change and to share some of their views on complex challenges they are trying to address.
This November, we run our partner spotlight series again as we continue to be surrounded by inspirational network champions. We are welcoming to inHive’s website Hisham (PYCA), Julie (FAWE) and Emmanuela (Mastercard Foundation). As last year, the inHive team offer a frame to their stories – the projects we are delivering, the personal connections we share and the trajectories that got our colleagues where they are. Our partners’ blogs are then the pictures that depict some of the issues in their sectors and countries. Together they offer you a way to better understand what it means to build alumni networks for social change.
By Ján Michalko and Hisham Khan, Capacity Building Officer, PYCA
Ján Michalko: The Frame
Sitting in the back of Hisham’s car, I was amazed how skillfully he was navigating Islamabad’s traffic, while keeping fully engaged in our conversation on Pakistani culture and food. There are probably very few better ways to bond with someone you’ve just met than talking about food traditions. We instantly built great rapport, as his friendly and warm ways of relating to others came through.
Hisham was driving us to a venue, where the PYCA team was delivering training on youth-focused communication and reporting. It was November 2019 and we were going to speak with some of the women attending the training about their hopes for alumni networks at secondary schools in communities where they come from. The time we got to spendtalking to them was incredibly helpful as we were finalizing the design of the inHive-PYCA joint project, which was launched a few months later in 2021.
Since then, Hisham and I, supported by our teams, have been working with young women volunteers like Maria, Ayesha and Kainat to set up alumni networks at their schools in Peshawar, Swabi and Nowshera in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province. KP has a special place in Hisham’s heart. Despite living his whole adult life in Islamabad, he tells me “Nobody is native of Islamabad” a young, administrative hub that was built to replace Karachi as country’s capital and where his parents migrated from KP.
Hisham periodically delivers trainings on the use of social media and himself does podcasts and writes for Bolo Jawan. Depicted here are students from Karachi University after the conclusion of their training.
Leaving the private sector to tackle education
Hisham is passionate about supporting education system’s change in KP. It is a big challenge, as he writes in his blog. He joined PYCA to tackle the issue partially from his personal experience as well as his desire to be helpful.
Hearing his life story, I learn how good quality education and language skills opened professional doors for Hisham. It was his business administration degree and excellent English that made him a highly desired candidate for jobs in telemarketing and call center services, which are some of the most important drivers of the Pakistan’s economy. Educated at one of Islamabad’s leading public schools at the time, he was able to pursue further studies and was supported by his family to do so.
After a few years, however, his work no longer challenged him enough to learn new skills. So, he left the well-paid corporate world to use his abilities to connect with people and contribute to the transformation of his country.
Hisham Khan: The Awakening
Coming from a corporate background, I don’t take much pleasure in saying that I had a fairly little knowledge about Pakistan’s development problems. You could say it was because my line of work and my areas of interest which never allowed me focus on problems which were around and very close to me.
Leading a workshop on social media, Hisham also worked with students from the Department of Communications and Media Sciences at Hazara University, Mansehra.
It was my first week in the development sector and some literature was handed to me to prepare for an upcoming orientation I was due to conduct in a public university. A statement which I read back in October of 2017, which sadly and unfortunately I keep reading and have to say on different occasions, still haunts me: “There are 22.8 million out-of-school children in Pakistan. Close to 13 million or 53% of these out-of-school children are girls”. This is 10% of Pakistan’s total population. It makes Pakistan the second country in the world with highest number of out-of-school children between the ages of 5 and 16.
Over the last 4 years, I’ve had the opportunity of overseeing numerous initiatives carried out by PYCA, from civic participation to social cohesion ones, but education has been very close to my heart, and I’ve tried my best to go out of the way to give back to my people and communities.
The number of out-of-school children in Pakistan is obviously incredibly high. But the situation of children going to public schools is also a dilemma. We have issues of basic provisions such has running and clean drinking water, electricity, boundary walls, lack of teachers etc. It goes without saying that Pakistan needs everyone to be one the same page in realizing that we are in deep waters.
What Should We Do? My Humble Opinion!
Addressing the problem of out-of-school children or improving the state of education in the country requires swift action from every government department both from federal and provincial regions, the civil society organizations working in the realm of education and also the communities. A recently published report by PYCA and Pakistan Coalition for Education (PCE) “Bringing All Girls to School” stated that to bring every Pakistani out-of-school girl to school by 2030, Pakistan requires around 6 trillion rupees and to also bring every out-of-school boy, Pakistan would need another 5 trillion. For a start, a national task force should be formed to formalize an action plan to generate these resources, but also to address all of the issues that are being faced by the education system of the country.
The government is taking initiatives already, like improving education development budget, introducing community schools and second shifts to improve enrollment. The Ehsaas education stipend program is the latest in the initiatives. This program has been launched in 160 districts of the country and will provide conditional stipends for education to eligible families with children between the ages of 4 and 22.
At the University of Gujrat, Hisham led a workshop on Effective use of social media to build a Tolerant Pakistan. This one took place in October of 2019 with 25 students from the department of Media and Communication Studies. The participants not only learned ways to use different social media platforms more effectively and responsibly but later on created content in the form of blogs and memes which was published on PYCA’s youth-led e-magazine www.bolojawan.com. The students addressed important issues like domestic violence, girls’ education, or bribery.
There are a lot of innovative, low cost and sustainable ways where the civil society and the communities can jointly put their efforts to improve the state of education in Pakistan. Our work with alumni networks is one of them. Alumni going back to their former schools to be mentors for girls or run leadership sessions as well as engaging with communities to motivate the parents to send their out-of-school daughters is a great initiative.
Majority of the girls in Pakistan, who are able to complete their education, carry a long list of struggles and challenges. Their journey of education isn’t a paved road, and these role models can certainly improve the overall state of girls’ education if the same model is replicated all across the country!