Staff Reporter
Sindh Minister for Information and Labour Saeed Ghani has sought the assistance of bona fide charitable organizations (NGOs) to provide education to children of labourers in the province under provincial government’s concept of universalisation of social security which will be launched soon.
The Minister stated this while addressing the concluding session of the Children Carnival and Inter-School Competition held here at Arts Council to mark the silver jubilee of the foundation of the Green Crescent Trust (GCT). The GCT had been managing a network of over 150 charitable schools in remote and rural parts of Sindh having enrolment of 29,000 students.
Saeed Ghani said that the Sindh government needed support of organizations like GCT, which could help the provincial authorities in meeting the target of educating children of all the labourers in the province.
“We will bear all the expenses of any such mission, while organizations like yours will work with us to meet this target”, “ We have no problem in working under such an arrangement”, he said adding “We will take you on board whenever this policy is finalized as we want support of organizations like yours”, said the provincial minister while addressing the GCT representatives.
He said the government was under obligation to lend full support to the private sector people who spent their time, money, and resources to provide education to children of underprivileged families as by making such efforts they were sharing the responsibilities of the state.
He assured full support to GCT in its drive to provide quality education to children of low-income groups and also to fight the issue of out-of-school-children.
In his address, GCT CEO Zahid Saeed urged the government to declare educational emergency in the country with the support of the provinces to deal with the alarming issues like out-of-school children. He said that 4.2 million out-of-school children alone in Sindh was a serious challenge for the government. It needed to spend all the available resources and budget for the education sector in a transparent and efficient manner, he added.
Citing an example of China Zahid Saeed said that per capita income of Pakistan would increase by five times if the government worked with dedication to improve educational standards and started enrolling the out-of-school children.
Comissioner Karachi Iftikhar Shalwani, Vice-Admiral (Retd) Arifullah Hussani, Arts Council President Muhammad Ahmed Shah, and others also spoke.
