By Hamid Khan Wazir
ISLAMABAD: The enormous 22.8 million Out of School Children (OOSC) haunted each government constantly but yet no tangible and workable solution put in place to deal with this herculean task.
To deal with the gigantic problem, TAKMIL – Teach A Kid Make Individual Life, a Nonprofit Organization, comes with a new and much-needed idea to replace ‘Illiteracy with E-Literacy’.
In this regard, the organization is all-set to organize Virtual Conference on August 15 aimed at bringing together an alliance of different perspectives from educationist, governmental, IT, and non-governmental organizations and explore the impact and the different arrays of solutions to highlight the issue of 22.8 million OOSC and to help minimize the number of such children in Pakistan.
Maria Alam Project Coordinator TAKMIL stated that they are organizing this Virtual Conference to bring together educationists, the international community, and other nonprofits to discuss not only the worrisome figures but to come up with realistic solutions to tackle this challenge.
She said that keeping in view the severity of the topic, it would be very instrumental if Pakistani journalists and relevant media personal attend this webinar.
The conference would be attended by prominent and know education experts including Mosharraf Zaidi, senior journalist, and communist; Minister Muhammad Saleem Ranjha; Dr. Amjid Saqib; Yousaf Hussain; Lauren Lichtman; Wanda Bedard; Bilal Musharraf and Dr. Naweed Syed.
Statistics published by Alif Ailan in 2012 give the figure of 22.8 million OOSC in the country.
This figure demands attention and substantial efforts towards making an impact in the lives of the unseen children of our country.
TAKMIL was founded in 2017 with a mission to educate OOSC in Pakistan and bridge the gap of education for the underprivileged and remote communities of our country with a lot of emphasis on quality education for girls, children stuck in child labor and abuse.
Maria has said that our model is digital and accelerated and we are proud to say that it does not require traditional school structures to function, making digital education combined with solar energy to light these children’s lives with education and a means to be an active part of our society.
She said currently we have 22 schools in 34 remote communities in Pakistan. Our target areas have mostly been the areas where there are no functioning government schools available.
With the ongoing pandemic, education is bound to undergo a transformation and it is crucial that we bolster the access of education to approx. 22.8 million out of school children in Pakistan whose lives are already predicted to be the hardest hit due to COVID-19.
In such times, it is vital that we come together to form an alliance to ensure that a post-COVID-19 world is one which is more equal and realizes the potential in each and every one of our children, she added.
