Karachi : The Sindh government will fully back the proposal of handing over its school buildings to genuine and committed charities to ensure quality schooling to the children from the deprived families in the province.
Sindh Planning & Development and Energy Minister, Syed Nasir Hussain Shah, stated this while speaking at a ceremony held at the iconic Quaid-e-Azam House Museum on Fatima Jinnah Road to celebrate 13 years of uninterrupted service by the non-profit Al-Furqan Welfare Organisation (AFWO) in Sindh to impart quality schooling to children from underprivileged areas.
The provincial Planning & Development Minister said the Sindh government had passed laws to allow bona fide non-governmental organisations to adopt public health and educational facilities and run them under the public-private partnership mode to the maximum advantage of the underprivileged. He told the audience that many renowned health and educational institutions were already being run by prestigious non-profits in Sindh.
The Planning & Development and Energy Minister praised the untiring efforts of the devoted charities to provide quality education to children from disadvantaged families and appealed to generous donors and philanthropists to fully support such genuine charitable causes. He said the Sindh government as per the pro-people vision of the Pakistan Peoples Party Chairman, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, would extend utmost support to such bona fide non-profits in the education sector striving to enrol out-of-school children. He said the Sindh government would also accelerate the drive to install solar panels at the premises of educational institutions to help them decrease their electricity expenses.
Sindh Culture Minister, Syed Zulfiqar Ali Shah, also spoke and backed the idea of handing over government school buildings to genuine NGOs for their best utilisation to spread education in the province. He said the heritage sites and holiday resorts in Sindh including Quaid-e-Azam House Museum and Keenjar Lake were available for conducting functions and recreational activities by the schools being run by the charities in Sindh for the children from underserved areas.
Rubina Faryal Asif, AFWO founder and President, said her non-profit had ventured into the education sector of Sindh 13 years ago with a lone one-room school enrolling 16 children and hiring services of two teachers. She said that her charity had now been running 16 schools with an enrollment of 3,000 children from underserved areas of Karachi and other parts of Sindh. She said that 120 graduates of the AFWO’s schools had been getting college-level education. She informed the audience that up to 75 per cent of students enrolled in the schools of her NGO were girls. She further told the audience that the AFWO aimed to expand the number of its schools to 50 with a capacity to enrol 10,000 more out-of-school children in Sindh in the next five years. She said that her charity could achieve this target in a few years if spacious government school buildings were handed over to it. She expressed gratitude to the Sindh government’s Energy Department for installing roof-top solar panels at the schools of her NGOs to slash their monthly energy expenses.
Sindh Fisheries and Livestock Minister Muhammad Ali Malkani and renowned actor Behroz Sabzwari also attended the event and praised the efforts of the devoted NGOs for speedily enrolling out-of-school children in Sindh.
