IKEA Social Initiative helps children in Pakistan
A. Sami Malik, UNICEF
© UNICEF Pakistan/2010/Sami
Young girls at the Ghaziabad Education and Counseling Center in Faisalabad, Pakistan. A partnership with the IKEA Social Initiative provides education and psycho-social support through the center.
FAISALABAD, Pakistan, July 28, 2010 — Only a year ago, Nazdana, age 8, spent her days picking paper, bottles and metal pieces from the heaps of garbage littered around the city. Today, her world has changed completely. She sits reading from a textbook, dressed in a tidy school uniform, at the Education and Counseling Centre in Ghaziabad – enjoying her newfound freedom from hazardous work.
Ghaziabad is a low-income residential area in the otherwise affluent city of Faisalabad. A center for textile production and export, Faisalabad exhibits wide extremes of social and economic disparity. Amidst upmarket mansions with tall boundary walls and private security guards are the tattered tents of nomadic families squatting illegally by open sewers and railway tracks.
Child labor and its toll
© UNICEF Pakistan/2010/Sami
A classroom full of students at the Ghaziabad Education and Counseling Center in Faisalabad, Pakistan.
Most nomadic families in Faisalabad and many other urban areas of Pakistan are involved in rag-picking: They collect garbage from around town and sort out items that can be sold by weight at meager rates to recyclers.
Every day at 4 a.m., whole families set out to pick through garbage heaps in the streets and open spaces. Most children in this community are out of school and vulnerable to many different forms of abuse, as well as the health risks associated with their work.
Nazdana is glad to have escaped such a life. "We used to stuff garbage into our sacks and drag them to the ground close to our tent," she recalls. "We looked through the garbage for paper, bottles and metal pieces – anything that we could sell.
"My fingers would cut and bleed almost every day from broken glass," Nazdana continues. "After sorting out the garbage, I, my sister and cousins would hang around in the streets all day long. We wouldn’t bathe or change clothes for weeks, sometimes months."
Preventing child abuse
© UNICEF Pakistan/2010/Sami
Young women from the nomadic community in Faisalabad, Pakistan receive vocational training through a UNICEF partnership with IKEA.
UNICEF started the Child Abuse Prevention Project in Faisalabad in 2009 to help children like Nazdana. To implement the project, UNICEF selected the Hayat Foundation, a non-governmental organization with a good local network and strong experience with social mobilization.
During 2009, UNICEF’s corporate philanthropic partner, the IKEA Social Initiative, provided more than $90,000 to support 17 Education and Counseling Centers, or ECCs, in Punjab; the centers have benefitted nearly 7,300 children. In Faisalabad, around 700 children are currently enrolled in four ECCs located in disadvantaged areas.
The centers were established in Faisalabad to create a protective environment for the most vulnerable children. To achieve this, they provide non-formal education in life skills, as well as recreational and vocational training, psycho-social support and referrals. These services help children who are out of school gain a basic education and learn to protect themselves from violence, abuse and exploitation.
In the year since their inception, the ECCs have grown in reach and scope. They now use the official Punjab Province syllabus, thus allowing a pathway from non-formal to formal education. Young women at the centers take vocational classes in marketable skills such as dressmaking and embroidery to have an alternative source of income.
'There is no turning back'
"When we approached the nomad community to introduce the idea of sending their children to the ECCs, they thought it would be a waste of time and a financial loss, as each child earns around 150 Rupees per day by selling items collected from the garbage," says Sadiq Khan, one of the project’s supervisors, recalling its early days.
"Once a few children started coming to the centers and we gave them uniforms, shoes and books, other children got interested too," she adds, "and the number of children in our centers started to grow."
Nazdana is one of those children. Now, instead of sorting through Faisalabad’s monumental piles of rubbish, "we wake up early and go to a woman in our community for Arabic lessons. Then we return home, get into our school uniform, pick up our books and come to the center," she says.
"When UNICEF starts a project like this, the idea is that the community assumes ownership once it is established and we pull out,” notes UNICEF Child Protection Officer Afshan Tehseen. "Indeed, the initial phase is the most difficult. The Hayat Foundation has done well to establish four centers in this city, and the financial support from the IKEA Social Initiative has been invaluable. The community has realized the importance of sending their children and women to these centers, and there is no turning back."
