The non-profit Green Crescent Trust (GCT), which has been striving to enrol out-of-school children in remote and underprivileged parts of Sindh, has not experienced the closure of any of its schools not for a single day due to any security-related issue in the past 29 years since its inception.This was disclosed by GCT Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Zahid Saeed as he spoke at a fundraiser for the non-profit organisation for schooling of over 30,500 children belonging to underprivileged families who are enrolled in 160 GCT schools in remote and impoverished areas of the province.
“On the basis of our continuous work in the past 29 years, we have been able to bust two very popular myths about Sindh: one is that feudal landlords of the province do not allow the opening of quality schools in their areas and secondly they oppose schooling of native girls,” said Saeed. He added that the GCT had opened its schools in such remote and underprivileged parts of the province where there was no government school.
“Even then our schools never ever faced any law and order problem,” he said. He told the audience that of a total of over 30,500 children in the GCT’s schools, 14,500 were girls, which showed that his charity had faced no issue in enrolling daughters belonging to deprived families.
“Our way of working is that prior to the opening of a new school in a faraway area, we take into confidence its influential persons about our plan to spread education in the area and we always get fullest cooperation from the elders of the community that is going to be benefited from our charitable activity,” he explained.He said the GCT with the support from philanthropists, donors, corporate sector, like-minded charities and government agencies would continue its drive to educate children of Sindh.
He informed the audience that the GCT had the aim to increase the number of its charitable schools to 250 till 2025 having enrolment of a total of 100,000 children from destitute families.The GCT CEO said some 25 million out-of-school children were one of the most serious national issues in Pakistan and all the relevant NGOs, charities, government and public sector institutions should join hands to tackle this problem in the shortest possible time.He said Pakistan had the massive potential to become a superpower like China in a few years but for achieving such a goal, it was necessary that each and every child in the country should get quality schooling.Speaking on the occasion, GCT Patron-in-chief and noted industrialist Sardar Yasin Malik shared with the audience his personal story of how education had enabled him to progress from an ordinary man in Karachi to becoming the country’s top taxpayer.He said that education was the only way forward for the new generation of underprivileged families to come out of the vicious circle of poverty and exploitation.
He advised the audience that after attaining education one should practice entrepreneurship for securing financial empowerment in the shortest possible time. He praised Saeed’s commitment to building charitable schools in the remotest parts of Sindh where concerned parents did not have financial means to educate their children.
