A doctor adopts schools to provide free education to the underprivileged

Karachi: A staggering amount of 24 million children are out of school in Pakistan with over 8,000 ghost schools only in Sindh despite the budget spent on education growing twofold. 

Syed Ali Asghar Naqvi, a doctor by profession astonished by the situation thought that something needs to be done about this. It all started when his cousin once called him at his tuition center to teach and from there that he needs to do something to help the downtrodden children of his society, ““Those people who have something they should give it back to the community to improve the condition of our downtrodden people.”

Speaking to ARY News, he said, “I was very inspired by the thought that education should be given to children who do not have opportunities to get them. We started off with a one room school Ali Model English School and now we are at 450 students. I saw an advertisement of adopting a school in Dawn Newspaper. I thought it was a great idea because normally you cannot adopt a government school because it is the government’s property. It is a long process but we started on. This school was in such a bad condition, there were no walls, metals rods, water, washroom, teacher or furniture. This school was also a den of all drug addicts of the area. It was a big challenge.”

The residents of the area, living there since 1986 were delighted by this initiative and said that the only thing they want now is for this school to remain functional, “Our request is only that this school stays functional. To run this school we need the same kind of order, the same face, beauty, attention so that our future generations can be successful and reach somewhere unlike us.”

However, none of it was an easy process. Speaking about the costs incurred in the whole process, Dr Naqvi said it has cost them 30 lac until now but it would be great to see more and more people to join his cause, “We have spent around 30 lakhs in this school. The government had declared this as a ghost school and as you have seen we have even put a filtration plant outside so that pure water can be provided to the kids.”

Water is the commonest source of many infection like Diarrhoea Typhoid and worm infestation. According to a study done by KU students, more than 50% of water of Korangi Landhi is contaminated with fecal matter. This is even worst in villages and small towns where content of organisms reaches more than 5000 where normal should be less than 500. Water is Human Right has installed 3 ROs in Korangi and one Filter plant in a village at Adham Sultan near Khairpur. They provide clean and fresh water to more than 2500 people free of cost. Dr. Naqvi is expanding his work by putting more pumps for those who have poor or no access to clean water and installing these pumps close to a school to provide clean water for prevention of water borne diseases, “We work on preventive medical care and this one on the step. We plan to put 5-8 plants by the end of 2018.”