SHANGLA: Shangla district residents have appreciated Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai for constructing a state-of-the-art school and college for orphans and poor students in their locality, a report published in local English newspaper said.
The school, which has been built in Barkana where there was no functional government girls college, aims to boost education facilities for girls in the backward region.
Initially, the school enrolled 190 girls from nursery to class three, and now it has students till class 6th. It was constructed in a span of two years over 20 kanals of land at a cost of Rs60 million financed by the Malala Fund.
The locals said out of 190 students, 90 were orphans, who were getting free education.
Faiz Mohammad, a local activist, said they were thankful to education activist Malala for constructing the college in the backward area to enable the local girls to get quality education at their doorsteps.
Dr Afsarul Mulk, a PPP leader, said Shangla was at the bottom of literacy rate in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa after Kohistan due to the apathy of the government towards girls education. “Malala’s initiative to build the college deserves praise,” he added. He also urged the education department to improve the schooling system in the district.
Sajid Shah, the school principal, said the institute was fully equipped with modern facilities. However, he said the road leading to the area was in bad condition.
Sidra Bibi, a 6th grader, said she was quite happy getting education in the institute because all the facilities were available there. She thanked Malala Yousafzai and his father for executing the project for the girls of Shangla.
“I will study in the school till graduation because it is near my house,” she said.
District education officer, female, Parveen Rehman said the school was equipped with modern facilities. She said there were two girls high schools in Koz Kana and Shahpur and a middle school in Damorai, so it was a good opportunity for the girls to get higher education in the Malala-funded college.
the building hosts 183 students, most between the ages of five and 12. Thirty-eight of them are orphans.
The road leading to its solid yellow gate is paved only partially, and girls walking up it are often escorted by fathers or elder brothers.
Some, said principal Sajid Shah, are transported by the school — an initiative paid for, along with the books, uniforms, tuition for the orphans and poorer students, teachers’ salaries and the building itself, by the Malala Fund.
Police have promised they will soon deploy three officers to guard the campus. When AFP visited Friday, they had not yet arrived.
TARGET:
The school is built on the outskirts of Shahpur, a town in Malala’s home district of Shangla — part of the region known as Swat, the scenic valley once infested by the Pakistani Taliban.
In 2007, the militants took control, waging a campaign of beheadings, other violence and attacks on girls’ schools before the army deployed 30,000 troops in 2009, declaring it secure by July that year.
Since then Pakistani and at times US officials have held up Swat — recently designated a safe tourism destination once more — as a success story in the country’s fight against Taliban and Al-Qaeda-linked militants.
But critics have long warned that Pakistan is not doing enough to fight the root causes of extremism, and beneath the surface peace in Swat was always fragile, as the attack on Malala herself three years later demonstrated.
By then she and her family had moved to Mingora, the main town in neighbouring Swat district — also part of the Swat region — and it was there that gunmen stopped her school bus on October 9, 2012, asked for her by name, and shot her in the head.
Her near-miraculous survival and subsequent fierce education campaigns have turned her into an instantly recognisable force for human rights.
But her emotional return to Pakistan Thursday for the first time since the shooting has refocused attention on Swat.
Security there has improved “significantly”, analyst Rahimullah Yusufzai said Friday, but rare attacks — such as one that killed 11 soldiers in Swat on February 18 — show the danger is not yet over years on.
“They (the militants) still have their facilitators and sleeper cells there,” Yusufzai told AFP.
In Shangla, Afshaar Alam, a medical student who is guardian to his seven-year-old sister attending the Khpal Kor school, said it was the best school in the area.
However his family had opposed his decision to send her there, he said, “fearing it may be targeted”.
MALALA IS EVERYWHERE:
Militancy aside, residents in Shangla said life in Swat was changing for girls and women, particularly in a conservative region where their access to education had long been problematic.
Congratulations to students at KKF Model School in Shangla on your first day! I was proud to give my @NobelPrize money to help build this school for girls in my home community. Thank you @MalalaFund, @Aman_Foundation, @TheBigHeartUAE & @susanmccaw. pic.twitter.com/HF4vsSdNpp
— Malala (@Malala) March 15, 2018
Education is highly valued in Swat, which is also plagued with natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods that in the past have left children studying in the open air even through harsh winters.
“I am grateful to Malala for her invaluable efforts to promote education, a task our leaders failed to accomplish,” Shangla shopkeeper Farman Ullah said after dropping his three daughters at the school.
“We have just one Malala today but after a decade or so, we will have Malalas everywhere.”
There was still no word Friday on whether the 20-year-old herself would go to Swat during her brief, unannounced visit to Pakistan.
Her schedule is being kept tightly under wraps out of security fears, which Yusufzai said was telling.
“Not taking her to her hometown means they are not confident,” he said, referring to the government and military establishment.
“If the government can’t provide her security, then what does it mean?”