Miyanji to restart WIN in Lyari

Education campaigner plans to use football to helps youngsters

LONDON: A young Karachi woman, who received death threats for her work to educate girls living in poverty, has joined a World Cup campaign to use football to help the disadvantaged.

Mahira Ahmed Miyanji has won 17 awards for her pioneering work with more than 2500 youngsters, many of whose parents could not afford to send them to school.

But the education campaigner was forced to suspend the scheme in Lyari — called Women Is A Nation (WIN) — after threats to her and male volunteers, some of whom were tortured by criminal gangs.

Now she is to re-start the programme after joining Right to Play and Generation Amazing, a scheme launched by Qatar to be the legacy of the 2022 World Cup, which Doha is hosting.

Talking about working with the Qatar project in Islamabad, Miyanji, 25, said: “I met a group of boys through the Generation Amazing project who were youth leaders and a few of them said, ‘let’s get WIN started again’.

“I said I can’t start it again because people are continuously threatening me — but my friends encouraged me and said, ‘We are behind you, we will support you’. I started my work again purely because of their help.”

Mijani was just 19 when in 2013 she launched WIN in Lyari, where drugs, gang wars and bombings used to be a regular feature.

The project was aimed at tackling the city’s very low literacy rate of 17 per cent among women, with families who can afford an education choosing to send boys to school instead of girls.

Generation Amazing was launched by Qatar to use sport to improve the lives of a million people in the poorest parts of the world as part of the tournament’s legacy.

It involves teams of volunteers going into refugee camps or deprived inner city areas to build football pitches for the local community and training up volunteers as coaches.

Miyanji said restarting WIN and becoming a Generation Amazing coach had helped her overcome her shyness and she was now able to address a room full of UN delegates — something she did earlier this year after receiving the NPeace Award by the United Nations Development Programme for Pakistan.

“I have had so many opportunities through Generation Amazing that I am very confident now,” she said. “I can speak in front of hundreds and thousands of people.”

Now having moved out of Lyari into the safer Katchi community, she talked about how football had helped her develop her self-belief.

“I love football now but I didn’t know much about it before joining Generation Amazing. I remember hiding during the early sessions, thinking that I couldn’t head or pass the ball. But after doing the training, I now know that football is a very passionate game. It engages you, it unites you. It also keeps you patient and helps you develop tolerance.”