Educate a Girl in Pakistan & Give Her a Future

This project report is a submission to GlobalGiving's 2017 Fail Forward Contest, where organizations are asked to share a story of when they tried something new that didn't go as planned and how they learned from it. Enjoy!

TAKE A METHOD AND TRY IT.
IF IT FAILS, ADMIT IT FRANKLY,
AND TRY ANOTHER.
BUT BY ALL MEANS
“TRY SOMETHING”.

-FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT

Like many other organizations, we started a project and we had our mind set on one thing that we want to help others and we want to make world a better place.

In 2013, we started our project Educate a Girl with a mission to educate girls because that’s what we believe in, that, to change someone’s life or to make it better, education is the solution. We thought that just because these girls couldn’t afford their education that’s the main reason that they are not getting education and to solve that issue we started to raise funds.

We contacted an institute and used to pay them for these girls to get educated. We almost educated 32 girls in our first batch in that institute but all we did was to raise money and give it to institute for the girls who were selected. As it was donor money so we had to be sure that its being used in the correct manner and we thought that for that we just need to check if the girls who are getting educated, really deserve that or not and that’s why the institute used to recommend the girls with proof from their utility bills and all, that they are really from a grass rooted background.

After we completed our first batch of 32 girls, we decided to make it more better and tried to search for ways. For that the first thing that came into our mind was the girl’s grades and what exactly their experiences are and we asked the institute to give us the attendance and grades also and when we received that, we realized that many girls are not taking their classes properly and that’s why their grades are effected so the end point is they are not learning properly.

This made us think that what went wrong exactly?

We had a programme planned that we want to educate more and more girls and to achieve that all we need is to provide funds for these girls education. But we were wrong and we failed because when the end result was not what we were expecting so our programme turned out to be failed project.

It was really hard to understand that how something this simple couldn’t have an end result, why exactly we failed in doing something that we believed we will do in the best possible way because we selected one of the best institute. It was not easy to accept the failure, it never was. But it was important and needed because until and unless we accept that we failed in something, we won’t be able to fix It or we will continue doing the wrong thing.

Although it was hard but we ended up accepting it and decided to make things work because we knew it that our vision is clear we know we want to help those girls to get educated but we just need to do things in a different manner now and so we decided to speak to the girls from the first batch so we could understand everything an try something new because it’s all about trying.

When we spoke to these girls we realized that its not only the financial conditions that are stopping them from learning, in fact there are many other things. One girl explained that,

“I want to learn that’s why I applied for this programme but I realized that its not easy to study while I have to do other household work also and which is important so I had to skip classes and once I did that, I was not able to cover that topic and couldn’t understand the next thing.”

One girl Haya said that she works half day as she needs money and get too tired to come to attend classes.

There were many other girls we spoke to and all had some reason which was stopping them from something that they know they should do and is important and that’s when we realized that its not only fund for education that these girls need, they also need the motivation. Its not only about them in fact its about everyone, they need motivation to do something.

Keeping this thing in mind we decided that we won’t rely on institutes for these girl education, in fact will do this on our own. We will bring trainers for these girls who could explain them things the way they want to understand. We will bring a type of education in which if they missed one thing, one lecture, they can always cover that up, so they understand that there will be many comas in their life but only they should decide when to put a period.

Most important thing that we realized is that these girls need motivation and we tried to bring that in the education and we still do, still we prefer to make each class worth their time so they wait for the next class and don’t think of different excuses for not attending it because when you actually want to do something, these issues means nothing.

Now we conduct these classes in different venues which are suitable for girls, and bring trainers that are more easy to understand or who make the learning interactive and fun filled. Now after every class we discuss things with these girls so we could understand if they are actually learning or not, this is not force education, we can never force someone to learn something but by explaining the importance of something we could make things easy for these girls and tat exactly what we are doing. We explain it to them that its not only about learning in fact implementing. That they could write their future and all they need to do that is education.

Now we have 2500 girls we have educated so far and we can say that they actually learned, we were able to motivate many of them. We were able to bring the light to them and now hope that they ll always keep that and won’t loose themselves in the darkness.

We are on the mission of transforming lives and failures couldn’t stop us because you don’t learn from your success, you learn from your failures.

In our last report we mentioned about the Educate a Girl Lahore 100 Scholarship funded celebration,now we are so excited to share with our donors that last week we conducted our training in Lahore - Pakistan and was able to transform 200 lives.

Lahore: Dawood Global Foundation & Hashoo Group hosted the Educate a Girl Lahore Summit at the Pearl Continental Lahore. The training educated an audience of 200 deserving Educate a Girl Lahore Scholarship winners from grass rooted background including deserving girls from SOS Children villages, Lesco/Wapda girls high School Shalamar Lahore, Lesco/Wapda girls high school Allama Iqbal Town Lahore, Syedanwala Girls College and cancer patients from Shaukat Khanum Memorial Hospital.

Keynote speakers included Australian Honorary Consul General Salim Ghauri, Souriya Anwar, Founder, SOS (Children's Villages), Syeda Henna Babar Ali, Packages, Sameena Kareem (late Arfa Karim's Mom), Maheen Taseer (wife of Shabaz Taseer), Hina Salman (make up artist), Omar Jamil, Qasif Shahid, Monis Rahman & Shameelah Ismail.
The full day training was focused on Entrepreneurship, Coding, Negotiation, Building a Brand, Grooming, Self-Confidence & Leadership.

“With the partnership and support of so many, we are delighted to introduce our award-winning Educate a Girl programme in Lahore, starting with the education of 200 deserving girls," stated Tara Uzra Dawood, Founder, Educate a Girl. "The aim of the program is to encourage young women to become leaders and women of influence and are very excited about our fantastic trainers and speakers.”

Pakistan’s female population is estimated to be 48.65 percent of the total, the majority of which lives in the country’s rural areas. In rural Pakistan opportunities, for women are still lower than those the limited ones for their sisters in the urban centres. According to Labour Force Statistics (LFS) 2012-2013, of the estimated 180 million people, only 12.51 million Pakistani females of various ages are in employment of some sort. There exists a cultural bias, which manifests as a discouragement from hiring women. Thus, this program is an important step to address an urgent need to increase the representation of women holding influential jobs in Lahore, to better address issues affecting women and girls, such as: domestic abuse, rape and sexual assault, harmful cultural practices, level of access to quality education and healthcare, child marriage, enacting laws and enforcing legislation to enhance overall welfare of women, female genital mutilation, funding constraints for business start-ups, entrepreneurial training and mentorship, gender equity in corporate board representation, pay differentials, low level of participation in governance and leadership by women etc.

Educate a Girl is a partnership between Dawood Global Foundation and Facebook's internet.org to educate 1 million girls globally and was just recognized by the World Bank as top 2% women-led initiative in MENA. EAG has successfully educated 1000 deserving girls in Karachi, Pakistan and 1250 in Lagos, Nigeria, including those orphaned by the atrocities of the Boko Haram. Funds are currently being raised for Morocco, Turkey and Canada (First Nations). This launch in Lahore will take this international movement truly national and we may even educate a future Prime Minister in our audience.

Educate a Girl to date has had many renowned trainers speakers such as Sculptor Amin Gulgee, Designer Deepak Perwani, News Anchor Nadia Naqi, Imran Zakir [Bureau Chief (KHI), Pakistan International Press Agency], Social Development Professional Bilquis Rehman, Grooming expert Khadija Chagani of Pivot Point, Honorary Consul General of Finland Sadia Khan, Fashion journalist Zurain Imam, News anchor Sana Hashmi, Tehmina Khaled, Shanaz Ramzi, Khursheed Hyder, Iram Noor, Dr. Fouzia Khan, Masood Lohar, Swiss Consul General Emil Wyss, Russian Consul General Oleg N. Avdeev, British Deputy Head of Mission Gill Atkinson, Juliet Kego Ume-Onyido, Wana Udobang, English Professor Emeritus Dr. Ishrat Lindblad of Sweden, Pakistan High Commissioner in Nigeria H.E. Agha M. Umar Farooq, Climate Journalist Sarah Phillips of Australia (in partnership with the UNDP and the Australian High Commission), Muhammad Ali, Northwestern University Professor and Chicago Tribune ace Finance Journalist Susan Chandler of the US (in partnership with the IBA Centre of Excellence in Journalism), as well as Alex Preston of the Guardian and BBC (in partnership with the British Council).

In Karachi, 5 scholars have become news anchors, 19 girls have contributed scholarships out of their first ever paychecks, 1 girl has funded 4 scholarships for her peers from her success and several girls have been placed in successful jobs or become entrepreneurs.

All of this was possible because of the support of our well wishers and wonderful donors like you all so on behalf of these girls, we would like to thank you all.

Together, We are transforming lives.