Giving Pakistani children a voice at Davos

It’s important to celebrate people like TCF Chairman Mushtaq Chhapra when educational institutes are under attack

With his thin, white beard and humble demeanour, you can’t really tell that Mushtaq Chhapra is a man on a mission when you first meet him. But the more you get to know and learn from him, the more you understand the power of one of the most audacious social transformation initiatives in Pakistan today: The Citizens Foundation, commonly known as TCF. Last year, Mushtaq won the Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award by the Schwab Foundation for the progress made by TCF in providing access to affordable, high quality education to children, especially girls, from economically disadvantaged families across Pakistan. For perspective, TCF has established over 1,000 purpose-built school units nationwide with an enrolment of 165,000 students.



I met Mushtaq, who is chairman and founding director of TCF, on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum at Davos last weekend. Over 40 heads of state and government, as well as 2,500 leaders from business and society convened at this forum and Mushtaq served as the voice of Pakistani children at this global agenda-setting summit. In the backdrop of his meetings was the horrific attack at Bacha Khan University, which killed over 20 people. This comes one year after more than a hundred Pakistani children were slaughtered in their classrooms in Peshawar. Conventional wisdom argues that one of best tools to combat extremism and promote tolerance is education and Mushtaq tried to make the case that an educated Pakistan is the best long-term investment for a secure and stable country.



TCF is a non-profit organisation set up in 1995 by a group of citizens, including Mushtaq and some of his friends, who wanted to bring about positive social change through education. Twenty years later, TCF is now one of Pakistan’s leading organisations in the field of education for the less privileged. Mushtaq is quick to point out that it isn’t him but his co-founders and brilliant team that has led to the success of TCF. The reason why it’s important to share and celebrate this story now is because every time an educational institute is under attack, our media is quick to descend and dissect the story, as is its job. But it’s also our job to highlight those people and organisations that are working to correct the wrongs and improve the education system in the country. It’s important for the media to use its 1,000 watt spotlight to shine a light on positive education stories. Let me use an analogy from development circles to make this point. Suppose you know how to swim and you see a man drowning in a river near you. You’re likely to jump and save the man. A few minutes later, you see another man drowning. You’ll jump back in to save him too. Then you see a third man drowning. At this point, you might think to yourself, is there a shipwreck or some problem upstream in the river which is causing this? Should I call for more help to solve the root cause or save the drowning man in front of me? One of my constructive critiques of TCF is that it focuses mostly on saving drowning (underprivileged and illiterate) children. This is great and we as the general public should support this cause. But TCF — and the media — also need to draw more attention to the story of drowning/illiterate children to secure more help and fix the root causes structurally. The media doesn’t traditionally help because stories like these don’t sell. And organisations like TCF don’t make advocacy a core part of their strategy because they want to focus on their strengths: building schools and educating children. How do we solve this dilemma? It starts with the realisation that Pakistan desperately needs everyday heroes to restore confidence in ourselves, otherwise the tsunami of bad news that we’re regularly exposed to in the media will make us negative and cynical beyond hope. Organisations like TCF can make advocacy a bigger priority because that will enable us to fix the root causes of the malaise in education. Beyond saving the drowning children in front of us, we will also serve as catalysts to encourage others (parents, governments, businesses) to fix the root causes. Meanwhile, the media needs to highlight stories of drowning children, which organisations like TCF have saved. These dramatic, extraordinary stories of families being transformed through education need to be heard as much as the voices of those who want to sow fear in schoolchildren and extinguish their hunger to learn and grow. 

Published in The Express Tribune, January 28^th,  2016.

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