The US Government, through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), has issued five educational scholarships to children affected by conflicts in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) earlier this week, says a press release issued on Thursday.
Over the next three years, USAID will provide a total of 1,000 educational scholarships to support conflict victims.
Armed conflict in Pakistan has claimed more than 15,000 lives since 2003, leaving scores of widowed women and orphaned children. To alleviate the impact of the conflicts on communities, USAID, through its three-year $25 million Conflict Victims Support Program is working to provide a wide range of support for individuals, families and communities suffering losses from conflict-related violence.
This support includes educational scholarships to the children who have lost family members to conflicts. “I can now finally have peace of mind. I want my children to have a better life than mine and that can only happen with education,” said the mother of one of the scholarship recipients at a ceremony in Islamabad.
The program will collaborate with Pakistan’s telecom sector to utilise Mobile Financial Services in the disbursement of scholarship funding to conflict victims. “The USAID Conflict Victims Support Program will use this alternative service to reach out to beneficiaries who have limited or no access to banks,” said Adnan Sher, party chief for the USAID-funded program.
“The program will deposit scholarships to the mobile accounts of the students, or their guardians, which will be used to complete their scholarship transaction with the utmost transparency.”
USAID provides scholarships to conflict victims
