Financial assistance: UK to support 0.4 m schoolgirls in K-P

ISLAMABAD:

The United Kingdom will provide stipends to secondary school girls across Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P), which will help 0.4 million girls this year. This was stated by the head of the Department for International Development (DFID) in Pakistan George Turkington, said press release issued on Thursday.

“As part of the programme, the provincial government will introduce a pioneering system of electronic payments to provide stipends to help girls stay in school,” he said. Stipends are payments made available to the, which cover their cost of going to school, and serve as a financial incentive to increase enrolment, he remarked.

Turkington said, new mechanism of distributing stipends, which will initially be trialed in four districts, will bring an added degree of accountability and transparency to the programme by ensuring payments are more efficient and secure.



The provincial government will also focus on the capacity building and training of Parent Teacher Councils (PTC) with the support of the UK government. As total of 4,000 PTCs will receive grants to allow them to take forward basic refurbishment and repairs of schools.  Repairing schools is a key priority since a number girls drop out after primary school due to a lack of facilities such as boundary walls and separate lavatories, the press release said.

“The UK has worked closely in partnership with K-P over recent years to deliver results on education, and the provincial government’s commitment to introduce an innovative system of distributing stipends to girls is another big step in that direction,” he added.

K-P Secretary Higher Education Farah Hamid Khan said, “the government of K-P values the financial and technical support provided by DFID to improve the state of education in this province.”

Published in The Express Tribune, March 15^th, 2013.