 My name is Shamaila Choudhury. I'm a senior South Asia fellow here at New America's International Security Program. On behalf of New America, thank you for joining us today. Today's conversation will focus on empowerment through education in Pakistan. And when I heard we were having this event, I was really excited because this is a topic that is typically underserved in the Washington discourse on Pakistan. So I'm looking forward to hearing Fizah Shah's views on kind of the nuances associated with working in a country like Pakistan. I think it's all the more important that we're having this conversation today given the tragic attack that happened in a school in Peshawar. Over 130 people were killed, several of them, most of them were children. So I hope that we can talk a little bit about doing work on education in this kind of security environment. But I hope that it doesn't overwhelm the conversation because I think that there's a lot of nuance associated with working on education in Pakistan. And there's been, you know, there's a lot of committed and dedicated people who have been working on the topic for decades. And we're very fortunate to have Fizah Shah with us who has been covering education for girls and women throughout her career. She is the founder and CEO of Development in Literacy, DIL, which is a nonprofit organization. It focuses on underprivileged youth, especially girls. It also focuses on providing professional development and training for teachers and principals in Pakistan. And she has been educated in Pakistan, the United States, and also in England. And she's continuing her education at UC Irvine. She's pursuing an executive MBA there. Also joining us via Skype, I hope this is going to work today, is Ms. Shereen Sale. She's a project manager with DIL NOAA, where she manages 21 schools in the Kharapur district in southern Pakistan in the Finn province. We're very happy to have her. She's also a college lecturer with the Pakistan Government Education Department. And prior to joining DIL, she did some work on family planning and reproductive rights health issues at Marie Stope Society. So both of you, welcome. And I'll just we'll we'll keep it casual. It's a small group and there's no need to be formal about it. I'll turn it over to Fizah and we can go from there. Thank you, Shamala. And yes, please, do ask any questions even while the earlier part of the section, because I do want to answer or at least know what you're interested in hearing. Waking up this morning to the devastating news about this attack by the Taliban on army military school was really heartbreaking. It really hit close because my father was in the army. He was an engineer in the army. And we went to very similar schools when we were in Pakistan. I think this is really hitting, hitting it where it really hurts. And especially touching the young innocent children. I'm hoping that there's going to be strong retaliation against this. But, you know, I I also want to tell you that even DIL has not been spared the wrath of the Taliban. In 2006, one of our schools was attacked by by the Taliban. Unfortunately, it happened in the middle of the night. So when they did burn the school, nobody was injured. But can you imagine the next morning? This was a girl's school. So the next morning when the girls came to school, it was. I remember the teachers relating to what happened and how sad they were and how they they cried to see the school burned down. And to be told that that that having an education, a modern education was was. You know, it was something that was un-Islamic and immoral. And I also take off my hat to the teacher who used to actually come from a nearby village when we tried to open a new school in that area. The parents actually refused because they were too scared. I mean, this is this had just happened. So so this brave young woman ended up opening a school in her own village. And these girls continue to get an education without an interruption. So, you know, there are those brave ones to that continue to fight against the struggle. And and I think in in terms of my own organization, I think it only strengthens our resolve to continue to do what we do and to continue and extend our network beyond the school, the areas that we are working right now. Before I start telling you about my organization, I also wanted to kind of set the stages to the kind of the context in which we work. I the organization started in 1997. Currently, we have about one hundred and twenty two schools all over Pakistan. And we are educating approximately twenty two thousand students. But the context that we work in is is what what really makes the work so meaningful. I am not that I don't know if you guys if you all if you have the background in terms of the adult the situation in the in Pakistan in terms of literacy. Pakistan's literacy rate is fifty five percent only. This is the adult literacy rate that there are almost twenty five million children in Pakistan right now that are not attending school. The majority of these kids are going to government schools and the dilapidated condition of almost forty eight percent of the government schools makes education very difficult and very not meaningful for these students either. They don't have toilets. They don't have boundary walls. They don't have drinking water. Some of them don't have furniture and some don't even have classrooms. So you can just imagine the quality of learning that's happening in these schools. The teachers at any given day between twenty to eighteen percent of teachers do not come to school. The curriculum itself at least the curriculum textbooks are very outdated and majority of the learning is by rote. So in a sense kids are going through school without learning much at all. A recent study that was done by Assar shows that fifth grade students English learning is at second grade level. The fifth grade students are not able to do double digit division either. Even in their own local native languages they are not able to read a storybook. So you know unless these issues are not addressed the country is never going to be able to break through these issues and problems that it's having currently. Let me tell you about what happens in Dill schools. Dill schools are providing a modern education. We really work on developing our students soft skills. They are critical thinking, problem solving. They are reasoning. We encourage them to ask questions. We try to build their confidence and we are seeing the results of this not only in the way these kids themselves are conducting their lives but there's also a change happening within the communities. And that is something that I really want to talk to Shireen about because Shireen has been involved with our Khairpur schools for over 10 years now and during this time she has been able to see the kind of change that has happened and I'm going to invite Shireen right now to maybe... Shireen, can you hear us? Yes. Shireen, I would love to hear from you the change that you are seeing in your students from the time that you started with Dill and now. First of all, good afternoon to all of you. I can't see any of them but it is good that you gave me a chance to talk here in such forum. As far as your question is concerned, what type of change has been done here? That means if I compare the current situation with the past 10 years. So if I see the 10 years ago, the situation was like that the community was not agreed to open their schools in the area and their vicinity. They were refusing us to open their schools for the girls. Secondly, they were not agreed. Once they agreed to open their schools, most of the community people were not agreed to send their girls to admit their girls to our schools. Thirdly, there was perceptions and social tables in their mind. Like their mindset was that the girls who gave education they would escape from their homes. They would marry of their own choice. And secondly, they were not thinking good to the earning girls because they thought that this is a shameful profession and awful something like that. So these all were their mindset. But if I see now after passing 10 to 10 years in the same field, there is a vast change in such perceptions and social tables. We have overcome these all things due to only education. Slowly gradually when we first opened the schools, we succeeded to open the schools. Though they were first not only from the side of the father parents but from the mother side, from the female side, there was a resistance to open the schools even. But slowly and gradually and so we talked with them, motivated the community, opened the schools there and first we had very low number of enrollment in our schools. So there was 25, 50 students just like that and they were not even regular. So people were also used to use them in the fields. They were taking house chores from these girls. Slowly after educating the girls and along with the girls, we also educated the parents through different meetings, through different advocacy sessions with the fathers. First we involve fathers and slowly we involve mothers too. So in this way we succeeded to get the girls in the schools. We increased our enrollment in our schools. Now it is more than 200 in each school. So they changed their perception like they were marrying their girls in early age like in KG class in class one or two or three. So they were on that time the students age from six years to eight years to a year. So now it has changed. They are getting marriage after at least after completing elementary class means eighth grade. So I could say that this is a big change. Yes definitely. Thank you Shireen. When I look back to the time when we first started our intervention in the rural areas of Pakistan, there were incidences where fathers would burn their daughters books. There were cases where girls would go to school when their fathers were not at home. So many of the fathers would work outside of the home. So in the morning when they'd leave these girls would at the same time get dressed and go to school and they would make sure they were back in time. They would hide their books. In a few incidences when the fathers did find out they actually ended up beating up the mother for allowing them to go to school. But they were so strong in the resolve to continue their education that nothing could stop them. And despite being beaten up and despite everything else the majority of the girls continued. And somehow the other ended up then convincing the dads and I'm just so happy to see that those kind of incidences are not happening anymore. Instead it is the other way around now. Instead we are all getting demand for more schools from neighboring villages especially and Shireen. I'm sure you can corroborate that as well because they are the ones who keep putting the people who are in the field like Shireen keep bringing these demands to us and we can fulfill some but we can't fulfill all of the things that we see in villages where there's no educated women. It's really really difficult for us to find women who are educated because majority of our teachers right now are the first women in their families to get an education. And Shireen maybe I'll ask you to say a little bit about that as well. But you know with time it is so... I'm seeing almost like a transformational change happening in these communities. Shireen said there were so many incidences of girls getting married at the age of 11 and 12 even now we hear of that once in a while. But the parents now that they've understood the value of education they are really kind of you know withstanding the pressure from the communities to get the girls married off early but they say no we have to get our girls through primary then it's through secondary then let them at least have 10 years of education. The other thing they are seeing is that our teachers are having very few children. I mean in the remote areas of Pakistan I can show you every person that I ask tells me that they have 10 siblings or 9 siblings and teachers are it's something that Shireen was telling me yesterday as well. She said most of our teachers and she's kind of done a study no more than 3 maximum 4 kids. So that in itself is attributable. Yes even when I... Yes sometime when I ask teachers why do you are confined to 2 or 3 they say no now situation has changed so we will not produce more children because these are enough we have to give them good quality education. So the teachers perception has also changed because they are now limiting their families to 2 to 3. If I see past years and it was 6, 5, 6, 7 like this so really it has changed a lot. And the teachers are the role models. You know they are the ones who really set the path for the younger the ones that follow. I want to tell you a very interesting story about one of our star teachers trainer who is Farzana Seyal. Her school was in a very very remote area of Sindh and that school also comes under Shireen's cluster. We were having a really tough time keeping enrollment of girls high enough to justify keeping that school open because they are cost involved in running a school and if there is not enough enrollment we start telling the staff to maybe think about closing the school down because we can always open it somewhere else where there would be more demand. The teacher got really concerned because she felt that there was so much need if they closed the school down it would be very detrimental to the girls. So what she did was she called the mothers over for a meeting and she asked them to sign their name as they were leaving. Believe it or not a single woman could sign her name because none of the mothers were educated. So as they were leaving she said you know how do you feel when you have to what do you do when you have to sign your name maybe on a government document and they said well we use our thumb prints and she said how does that make you feel I mean don't you feel bad about that and they said yes so she said you know what I'm going to teach you how to sign your name and you can bring your friends with you and she said next day all the women showed up all of the mothers with their friends and she said to them look nothing in this world comes for free. If you want me to teach you how to write your name you need to make sure that all your daughters are in school and that was she told me immediately after that they had a class full of kids you know because it just made the parents realize that they have to participate in this there is something to this education that they need to understand and this is how she started pulling them in and then from one thing to another and now Farzana has a school which has we actually just built the upper section is going to become secondary school soon enough and something else that I while I'm telling you Farzana's story something really interesting happened in the last couple of years now over a period of time some there were some kids that graduated from this school and because this is such a remote area there are not very many opportunities for girls to work most of them come back to teach and we've got a number of students in our schools that have come back as teachers so that in itself has given them a certain position in society that is really changing the perception of women and really redefining the roles of women in society as well and I'll talk about that a little bit later but coming back to Farzana's case so we she actually met with some of her student graduates and said you know we've taught you how to think critically we've given you these things skills we've given you everything we've given you skills you need to come up with something you cannot wait for someone to give you a job I mean there are only so many teachers that can come back and teach in the school and so you know they went out and they met actually the parents met with this I'm sorry the teachers met with the parents as well to discuss this with them because you can't just talk to the girls I mean this is an area which is very conservative and you do need okay from the parents before you can venture to do something because came back with a very novel idea of starting a women's store because remember in the backward areas of Pakistan it is the men who are who sit behind the counter they are the ones who own the stores and so even when women go to shop I'm sorry women cannot go to shop because if they go to shop they will have to either go with the husband or the husband goes and shops for them so when this store opened it's been almost two years it's done extremely well they've opened the students have opened actually two more stores after that but what was most remarkable was that that particular year when it was time for enrollment new enrollment into KG generally we would barely hit 20 kids we had 50 girls enrolled and we could only take 25 out of that because in a classroom we cannot take more than 25 so what I realized was that parents finally saw the value of education all this time if they got their daughters educated what would be the end result what was the means to this end where were they heading and this finally made them realize that yes there is a chance for their girls to make something out of their lives and Shirin you know the story well enough I mean how are the stores doing and what is the impact that you are seeing they are going very good and looking to those shops some other graduates came to open the same type of the shops and they have opened so looking to these girls others are getting interested and they want to open more shops not only confined to shops but they are doing also some other work like they are doing some handicrafts by through searching from the need they are looking the color combinations and now the work we have introduced their work in the markets and to the other handicraft shops so it has also they have also developed such type of source generation source so likewise some are doing good embroidery they had idea but they didn't had idea how to market their work so through net again in schools they come to schools they use the net and they they find some new trends and modern trends in such embroidery and they are doing that embroidery and we are again sending these to the Karachi market so our students I would say that they are really performing good and looking to each other and looking the impact of and their families too when they are looking that these girls are now the source of income generating and they are supporting their families their siblings so this has also increased their interest towards schools that's why more enrollment is coming to our schools and parents are just to enroll more students that's why as you told that we have initiated evening shift classes for those students to accommodate more students in the same premises in the same building so yes thank you Fiza and Shareen you both have mentioned a few times the positive impact your work has had on the women in the families and bringing them more into the process the few times that you've mentioned the men they've been negative and you've talked about parents getting more involved in being socialized I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more specifically about how your organization engages fathers and brothers of these young girls that are in your schools and how they have changed in their approach towards educating their daughters and sisters Shareen do you want to say something about that actually I would say in one case I remember now related to this that we opened one school in a village where there was a government building so we opened schools there and we had good enrollment in that schools there was a government teacher that also pointed in that school she was not used to come in the school but after looking at our students our teachers she used to come but not on a regular basis then she had a fear that maybe government staff charged her that she is not going to school and another in Jewish running school so she started teasing of the students our teachers and she created a lot of troubles that we should leave that premises and as a result when we saw this we talked with the community that the teacher is not ready that we continue giving education here in this school so what will we say so they told no they are the teacher is from the feudal Baderaz so we can't do anything against her so we simply said that ok we will close a school then if you are not agree for this then one student she was a student when she heard this she went on hunger strike she told that I couldn't take anything until you don't accommodate this school in our area so his father was very worried about that he came to us he told that ok I'm donating you a plot you construct a school building there because my daughter is on hunger strike and she she's not ready to talk with us and she has only one demand that do something for this school to sustain this school so I feel proud that we constructed building there and now the school is running very good and it is very successful and all the students are happy and the government is vacant now no one is ready to go there but they come to us so this so this is the mail sorry you are giving us an example of how the males have also been very supportive I think overall we have seen a huge shift there as well there were times as I said when men were very much against daughters getting married and especially brothers for some reason would really stand up and I think the fear always was that we educate a girl she's going to start speaking up and wanting her rights and this is one way to curb that but more recently a lot of fathers bringing their girls to school we did a recent intervention where we had our students teach their uneducated mothers and aunts and in some cases the fathers got who you generally see the fathers are more educated in the villages compared to women and the father stepped in to support their wives when the kids were kind of did something wrong or said something wrong the fathers would step in and that not only help kind of develop a better relationship amongst the family because with the kids and parents all involved it really I think made the fathers realize how important it is for the girls to have an education and they're already seeing the difference in their homes they tell us, the girls tell us that we are seeing that at least the families are seeing that educated girls they don't argue they don't negotiate with parents and very often these girls if they are married off into other families even there they're trying to negotiate with them and allow them to continue their education we are seeing a number of those cases as well so it feels like once it's like a movement that has started there and there is nothing that's going to stop it that's started now and for me it's a very very positive thing to see and I see this as the only solution to all the ills that every day that we come across in Pakistan especially these awful terrorist acts in my mind the only solution is education but not just any education what we need to provide is a quality education where we are actually imparting the right skills to the children so that they have a voice and they can do something with their lives I wanted to touch a little bit on our teacher training program which is really the strength of DEL we have a training college that provides that has been providing training to DIL teachers for over it started in 2006 so it's been quite a number of years now but more recently we've been imparting training to government schools and this year we are looking at providing training to government schools as well the I think the strength of our teacher training program is that it is really catering to the rural teachers that do not have access to long term education training programs so we continue to give them training over the year so during the summer there's a lot of focus on getting the teachers to work on their subject content knowledge because in the rural areas the teacher is first it's not that you have to teach a pedagogy, the training centers have to do much more than that you have to literally teach them the subject content and the concepts so that they can teach meaningfully and again I would ask Shireen to explain what the training does for the teachers but over the years it has empowered the teachers so much that it is the confidence with which to teach now you can see how that is changing the way the students are performing most recently we we got a grant from USAID and we have done an M learning project which is based on using smart phones to train to help teachers understand concepts so what we did was we initially we did an assessment on our teachers and we found the gaps in English and math and this was for the third and the fourth grade school teachers we then uploaded these videos onto the cell phones so remember in the backward areas they have no they really have no resources available to them beyond what they've been taught in their own schools and usually because this is the first generation of teachers in those backward areas their own understanding of subjects is very very poor so this project has done extremely well it has improved the concept clarity in math by 40% and the concept clarity in English by 30% we are now hoping to take this program to scale because it's one of the few mobile learning programs that has done well throughout the world we are hoping to take it to government schools this year and then even maybe beyond the borders of Pakistan because English is as a subject it is taught in English so it should not be an issue but in areas that have very similar kind of set up as Pakistan such as maybe Afghanistan and even India those areas that we also contemplating taking the program Fiza you mentioned the teacher training will focus on some government schools could you talk a little bit about your organization's relationship with the government and working in the sector we have actually not had too much interaction with the government so far but we understand that majority of the students are going to government schools and as our work is getting to be organized in Pakistan we are being approached by so far it has been non-governmental organizations but we have been talking now to the KPK government and they are quite interested in us taking over certain schools so we will right now be in the process of negotiating with them but that is definitely an area we would like and what is your personal it's a good opportunity for DIL but what is your personal opinion of that given that it strengthening kind of this private network the public investments in education are lagging and Pakistan in terms of its social development indicators is also not doing very well what kind of message does this actually send in your opinion well first of all I am a bit skeptical I don't want to say anything right now until we actually work with them and see how it goes but from what I have seen of government school teachers the issue is that they are not they don't teach in the classrooms even though they are better educated because they have to have an M.Ed and they have to have a B.Ed to be able to teach and they are usually the women who have had the most education in a village but when they come to school they don't want to teach it's just a phenomenon that we have seen across Pakistan I am not sure if you have heard about Go schools but that's another unfortunate dilemma in Pakistan there are a number of schools that are just there on paper and the teachers get their salaries but they do not come to school and we have adopted a few of these schools where we have applied our own teachers and gotten the kids into school and they become functional yes and please if you could please introduce yourself before you ask your question Jim Vandenbus USAID I wondered if you if Dil used any of the school vouchers like the system used in the Punjab where the private schools receive some of the vouchers from the public school system they get some assistance from the government and then a second question is what is your financial model how do you pay for your programs yes that's a very good question thank you in answer to your first question no we have not used vouchers what we have seen is when you provide quality the kids come and especially more recently we are having to deny kids access to our schools because we don't have enough seats open but you are coming back to your second question what is our model we do fundraising in the US in the UK as well as Pakistan we are also registered in Hong Kong and Canada so most of us are funding is coming from Pakistani expatriates and then of course we get foundation funding as well and we have received a couple of grants from USAID and from UK aid as well another question working here as a fellow my question is for the last 25 to 30 years we are hearing a very successful stories of NGOs working in the Pakistan in the field of education and they are training lot of thousands but I think lack of teachers have trained so far lack of children have got education with the help of UNESCO UNICEF and other NGOs why over the standard of education and education is declining day by day in Pakistan what is the reason do you think what is your you know the NGO sector is very small in Pakistan it's not that large and there are very few organizations that are really doing there are very few organizations that are providing the quality of education that you need to see changes in the country majority of the private schools especially in the low income private schools is what you are talking about I guess the ones that are run by NGOs you still see there is road learning going on there is really no change in that sense still there is there is a complete change in the way education is being imparted you are not going to find you are not going to find leaders and you are not going to find even people who can take on decent jobs because there is if you cannot speak English if you cannot read there is no prospect for you in that situation the thing is that I would like to add something on the question asked there is no consistency of the same work of the NGOs sometimes like some projects are for the short period project education project but it needs to be worked more on the same type of the project like we are doing we are working on the same project for the last 10 years but we are working in some limited area so it needs to be work continuously because there are some NGOs which work for some limited period they can't see the impact exactly it might be the reason that we are not getting such results I think she what I recall earlier on I am talking about the time when we first started our work in Pakistan majority of the NGOs were setting up schools that were doing in 3 years they would do a 5 year curriculum majority of the schools are one room one teacher schools and you know if you expect a teacher who barely has a good pedagogical skills herself asking her to teach 5 grades at the same time what kind of quality are you going to see in those schools and that's exactly what's happened a lot of money has been thrown into these schools and you are seeing no results at all you are doing some cooperation with KPK government have you raised any question about KPK government is going to radicalize our curriculum so you have raised any question against this issue or not well we we are very much in the very early stages we haven't really discussed curriculum anything right now we are really looking to see how we can have a meaningful you know kind of partnership with them so we will those those topics will be raised because they'll what we did was although we follow the government curriculum standards and by the way the government curriculum standards are extremely high the international they are almost at the international level we actually find them a little too aggressive even for our own schools and we need to we taper them down a little bit to kind of suit the to make sure that our teachers are able to teach at that level but yet again I mean you know when it comes to the books and when it comes to the teachers you don't see any performance at all we do not the curriculum textbooks not the curriculum standards are totally different right it is some of the textbooks we do not use the government textbooks we use OUP we we had to scar the market to find the right textbooks even the textbooks on the market are not actually meeting the government curriculum demand that they don't you know there's so many things that are left out so we found the right book and then we have we have developed teachers guides and we use those guides to compensate for what's missing in the books I would just like to ask a follow-up question to that is what is the level of government oversight I guess you could say in terms of your work being that these are private schools are they looking at the curriculum and you know analyzing the textbooks or how the teachers are qualified in terms of their education I mean is there a heavy amount of oversight or is there they're totally hands off there is absolutely no concern at all our students do take the fifth grade and the metric exam because in the rural areas obviously we cannot have them even the Al Khan foundation their curriculum is in English so you cannot have our kids take those exams so we do prepare them it's sad but for the fifth and the tenth grade we have to teach them the way the government wants the students to start because otherwise they will not pass their exams it's all based on road so before the exams we just get the government books and we just get the students to learn and to pass those exams and how do you enter a community how do you choose these schools and oftentimes you're invited of course but how do you start a Dill school somewhere you know in the beginning when we started our work we would look at we would actually look for good NGOs to work with because Dill started in the US it was really an effort of the Pakistani American community to give back to a country that had invested in their education most of us are my generation we went to school in Pakistan and it was our choice to leave Pakistan and come to our adopted land but we always had this sense or maybe this nagging feeling that we took away a resource when we left Pakistan because Pakistan our education Pakistan was free and what better way to give back than to educate children in Pakistan and that was really the premise behind Dill's Dill being created so where was I you took me somewhere else how do you enter into a community so how do we enter into the community so the demand from this community was to when we first started we started in Punjab the very first schools that we opened up and then we looked at our population or our donor population wanted us to kind of spread into the other provinces as well so there was a lot of trust there but initially what we would do we are also established in Pakistan we have a board in Pakistan we registered in Pakistan and they are the ones who go in and do due diligence so we would first look for a good NGO three four years of experience in education and we would work with them so for the first five six years we worked with partners and then we realized that for us to really get a good understanding we needed to start opening our own schools as well and at that point you know we again we started in Pindi and Islamabad those were the first areas where we started our schools but it was only the first few projects where we actually embedded the organizations and went into those areas after that we've only been expanding so where we are at we continue to kind of expand our footprint within those areas and that way you can't just go in and do a one-off school because for you you need management so whenever we go into an area we want a minimum of 10 to 15 schools because we have school officers and we've got project managers and also teacher training becomes less expensive then because when we train then we train all the teachers in the cluster one more question the gentleman had the question back there could you say something about parental involvement in deal schools we have PTAs and we have very strong PTAs and very often the PTAs end up doing projects so for example if there is a need for maybe a water cooler or something like that they will actually collect funds very often the land has been given for the school has been given by the community and it's usually a parent and also parents are involved in the sense that they have parent days for the parents when they come in and they share the report cards of the students with them it's just like it's very similar to our schools there's honestly in that sense there's not that much of a difference they have parent days for the parents they'll do other events at the school where they invite the parents so there is a lot of parental involvement now it's so important because the parents have to understand that the kids need to be in school every day and this is the only way to get them involved and many of them are not educated but even then they know the difference between a good school and a bad school we do and I'll tell you why we do that we charge 100 rupees only per child, per month and there is a reason for that that 100 rupees doesn't do anything for them it's really being put into an account so if the school needs something they'll use it for that but this started very early on because we felt that if the parents even give a little bit, contribute a little bit towards the child's education they will make sure that the child comes to school a free education they believe doesn't have value it's nothing more than that but we do charge a very small fee you mentioned foreign donors a little bit I know that this sector is one in which foreign donors are heavily engaged in the United States and the United Kingdom and a few others and I think that's a good thing but could you comment a little bit on how foreign donors can be most effective in working on education in Pakistan, given all of your work you know yes I think it is very important that foreign donors monitor how their funds are being used because very often what happens is that the funding is given and there's so much corruption in the public school system itself that a lot of the money is deciphered off and I know that the situation right now on the ground is such that very often they're not able to go and visit but you know I've been saying this for a while can do a lot of that work for you for the foreign funding organizations as well engage them but make sure that you see where the money is being used any other questions? well Sherin is there any final comments you'd like to make? Sherin can you maybe just talk about the impact of mobile learning on your teachers because I know that that was something you had wanted to say to talk about yes actually mobile learning project I myself is very much satisfied from that project though I had a lot of feel when first we started initiated the project and first when I was told that such type of project is coming and they are launching such project so I try to to some extent that how this project will run and what will be happen if we did not succeeded there was also a fear that if the advice is mishandled and teachers couldn't understand what is being taught in that so but once we initiated the end of same fear was also in the mind of teachers they were thinking that this might create trouble for them this might they might be engaged more and every time they had to submit the assignments through phones but once it is launched and we've seen a very good impact and enthusiasm of teachers increased and there was a lot of change in the teacher's behaviour teachers were very interested to see the videos they were downloading the videos in their cell phones and they were taking those devices at their homes and they were looking when there was electricity breakdown in our area it is very huge problem so at that time they were looking these videos so in this way they were becoming more learned through this they were also making their lesson plans looking the activities the activities also supported them how to make the activities and they made lesson plans and they became able to deliver the classes accordingly so I must say that these devices supported a lot with the teachers especially also the new teachers even when the usually when teachers come we give them orientation how you have to teach and some basic information regarding the teaching in school but some teachers don't have much knowledge on the content so it makes trouble sometimes but these devices made easy when they first come to become as a teacher we give them these devices and they see the videos they increase their content knowledge and they were well aware how to teach the class so and through these phones I seen a lot of change in the teachers personally even they become change their confidence level quickly they build their confidence level first few teachers I saw they were confused while they were speaking but after some time I saw them they were very vocal there wasn't any shy among them so I just want to kind of reinforce that because what she is reported and this is especially with the mobile phone program she said that you know technology is amazing really is amazing what she saw was a change in an increase in the teachers confidence level because suddenly this teacher had that she was able to view these videos and to improve her own capacity to teach and when she took that in the classroom the kind of response that she started seeing from the students actually helped build her own confidence and I mean that was one thing we weren't expecting that kind of a change to happen and the other thing I wanted to mention was that in about 50% of schools we have computer labs and the kind of improvement that those have bought about is also quite mind boggling the teachers are doing research students are doing research very often the students are taken into the computer lab to show them certain concepts you know especially science concepts that they need more clarity on so and we also because of that I think the reputation of the school has you know kind of it spreads the word spreads into the neighboring areas as well and in some of these schools in the afternoons after school we have programs where neighborhood kids can come and start working on the computers and learning computer you know how to operate computers and so on as well and our libraries as well we have libraries in all our schools and those are also open to the community so we are seeing after school kids coming in checking out books and also learning to read where majority of these kids have never even owned a book so you know the effects of the school are far reaching and they go way beyond just the kids that are learning in the school and Shireen that's something you are seeing in a lot of your schools as well right yes actually I would like to add something on the I am learning that the devices not on our teachers not only benefit from these devices but there in some instances we saw the change they told us the teachers told us that their and their sisters who are teaching somewhere else means in some other schools so they also took benefit from these videos they were seeing with their sisters and in one case one teacher told me that her father is a teacher in a government school so he was first he prohibited her daughter don't take this device because he was a reluctant person and he was telling her daughter that you don't have to take any while so he prohibited her but later he motivated that teacher that you take and this will benefit you and after taking that device a very good result and very good behavior change we saw in her family that his father who was a government teacher he told her daughter okay give me your device I want to see these videos and he saw those videos and he implemented the same things in his school so that was a good story like to mention here you must share that story with us in the next quarterly report but yes so these are things that we have not documented yet but can you imagine these videos are now being seen by other teachers and even government school teachers who are using them to improve education as well thank you so you know you've talked a little bit about the teacher training and the development of the schools and the curriculum development and that is all having a positive impact what do you see going forward for they'll and broadly speaking for education for girls and women in Pakistan over the next 5, 10 years and onwards what is the vision and the organization's vision for that well first of all we have only focused on the primary curriculum so far so we have to now starting this year we are now looking at the middle school curriculum so we are going from 6 to 7 to the 8th grade what we've learned through our training especially the mobile the mobile learning program is that the students have also been very interested in looking at the videos themselves so in some cases the teachers have actually taken the, they were not supposed to but they just ended up doing it themselves so I take them into the classroom and showing them to the students because these videos were really made only for the teachers and they are seeing very positive results because remember that it takes us years to train our teachers we do also we lose teachers at about 12% per year so new teachers are coming in constantly as well but when you have a video done by a guru teacher who really knows how to teach the impact is very different and what we are now thinking is and we are hoping to get funding for this but we want to, for the 6th and the 7th and the 8th grade we want to start taking these videos into the classrooms so at least when the child first learns a concept they are learning it the way it should be taught because 6th graders don't need that the kind of socializing that the younger kids need because you can't do this for the younger kids the teachers have to socially they need to interact there is a lot more that needs to happen at that grade level but when you are looking at the higher grade level it is a different way to learn so our next focus for the next 2-3 years is exactly that we want to now start working on the curriculum for the higher grades and then take it up to metric so that we can the results that we are seeing in our primary school we continue to see them if she wants to say something here but from our schools there is this huge demand that you know don't stop at the primary we need more it's taken us a while it's not that easy because we have been building our curriculum up so we did the 1st grade and then the 2nd grade so every year we add on a grade so now we add the 6th grade it's going to take us a few years to get up to metric but we again and the plan is to take it beyond those schools and take it beyond those schools through our training college where our future focus is I'm really not a big proponent of making buildings I think even a simple you know structure is fine it is really what is inside the walls of the school that is important and that's where we want to keep our focus and we feel that training is a way that we can really utilize our funds to the max every teacher you train is going to affect 25 to 50 kids every year, year on year so when we open a school building a school right now in Pakistan costs you approximately $100,000 if we take that money and we put it into teacher training the results are much, much larger you touch so many more kids that way so our team college is where our focus is going to be and we are hoping to start offering and we are going to be offering short courses not the 2 year B.Ed or the 2 year B.Ed and the 4 year M.Ed course and we really focus on the rural teachers needs and those are vastly different from the you know from the urban teachers needs Are there geographic areas that you haven't been able to get into that you would like to access over the next 5 to 10 years? We have we were in Rajasthan for a few years and at that time it was only we only did high schools the government actually took over that project and because we were not directly engaged in terms of we were funding that project more so than being directly engaged but we did make sure that we provided good quality teaching training and so on we funded all that and it actually ended up being a very successful program and from what I have heard UNICEF has adopted that as some as we did so it's about having a cluster of primary schools and then you have a high school for girls only because again it's a very very conservative area and so you would like to get back into Balochistan? We want to get back into Balochistan but at the primary level because that's where our strength is and then we'll take it up to middle school so we really want to take on a cluster of primary schools and we've been discussing that as well in 2015 is when we're going to go back into Balochistan There's a question back there Will you need government assistance to push back into Balochistan? Would it just be a solitary move? Would you need security and things like that to reinforce what you're doing? We generally keep a very low profile even in the where earlier I spoke about one of our schools being burnt down we do not construct large school buildings, we just stay under the radar usually our schools are in they look more like homes and that's in Balochistan again I think we're going to enter just that way I don't think we're going to go in with a bang it's just staying under the radar and just doing our work because we will keep focusing on girls education methodology In Pakistan there's a main emphasis on memorization so do you have do you introduced have you introduced any critical thinking in your teaching system? Absolutely, our system is totally activity based our teachers it took us a while, it took us about a year or so to break that habit teachers couldn't understand what we meant when we said you cannot teach by your support, that's how they learned but when they started we use the latest teaching techniques that are used there in the US and when they started using those techniques and they started seeing the results and they started seeing how kids were learning much faster that's when they started adopting and really kind of believing in them, so yes we broke that it was such a pleasure when we first saw that our teachers were actually using techniques and activity based learning Please introduce yourself My name I've spent a decent amount of time in Egypt and there's a lot of parallels between Egypt and Pakistan especially this dichotomy between a modern identity and an Islamic identity that's kind of like clashing that we see all around the Muslim world and while you were talking it kind of occurred to me that perhaps in order to try to reach some sort of middle grounds between these two identities I guess this comment is more of a suggestion but do you think it would be effective to potentially maybe incorporate some sort of spiritual values religious learning in a sense that is an antithesis to the extremist rhetoric that incorporates religion but in a form of social good and public service and love and the things that religion at its core really speaks to We don't touch religion as such because right now it's such a controversial topic in Pakistan that we just focus on subjects subject knowledge and learning but our kids are doing a lot of projects outside of their schools we're doing community projects we're keeping them involved there and I think those things are very important for them to understand the value of civics itself how they need to be a part of improving their own communities some of them have done projects like cleaning the streets and I mean so that's where our focus is and we do through social studies through other subjects we're trying to bring this in in our schools just the way we learned it when we were growing up but nothing beyond that totally yes and that's the heavily focus on critical thinking skills problem solving, reasoning we really encourage our children to ask questions and to reason with us there are a lot of open ended questions by teachers those are some things that we are watching constantly just a more specific question on the curriculum so who actually develops the curriculum for your schools is it the teachers in the school or do you have a board that kind of looks at all of the schools writ large and what should be taught so we as I said we follow the government 2006 national standards and then based on that we have our curriculum development department our English curriculum developer actually sits in the US and she also does the English and the math and then the Urdu and science and social studies is being done in Pakistan so yes we do we take the standards and then we fill the gap after one more question go ahead last one it's a simple question but obviously the UN and in particular UNICEF have a mandate to work with the government on developing the education sector and you've got something that's much more than just building schools you've got a model that works for capacity building and teaching teachers especially in rural context is there uptake in terms of working with you on quite a scaled up level in terms of using your model or working through you as a sub-government absolutely I mean we have not only are we strong in you know with our curriculum and our training we have a very strong reading program as well because I have learnt through phonics to read and when we compare them to the tests that nationally it's probably the most highly accepted tests nationally our kids performed extremely well and we are very open to that we want our model to be you know scaled through Pakistan because we know it's worked wonderful well thank you Fiza and Shareen thank you very much for taking time out of your evening this was a wonderful discussion and I learned a lot I'm sure everyone else did too thank you I also want to thank the new medical foundation for giving us this opportunity wonderful