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A LEARNING EXPERIENCE - 2002-08-04
Canadian-backed grassroots program in Pakistan puts village girls in school and helps women help themselves wrote Martin Regg Cohn in the Toronto Star. 'Backed by Canadian government aid, the Aga Khan Foundation helps villagers overcome formidable obstacles - natural and man-made - by bringing education and electricity to these former backwaters. Isolated by both geography and conservative local customs, women here have long borne the brunt of rural Pakistan's backwardness. The legacy of purdah - the covering up and confinement of women - has been poverty, disease and illiteracy. Now, with neighbouring Afghanistan facing similar obstacles - rugged geography, rigid gender traditions and ethnic rivalries - Pakistani aid workers believe they can replicate their success on the other side of the Hindu Kush mountains and help women emerge from the shadows. 'There is the same isolation,' says Munir Merali, a Torontonian who moved here in 2000 to take over the Aga Khan Foundation's operations in Pakistan. 'There is a lack of human capital, a lack of institutions in mountainous areas that are cut off.'
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Posted February 25th, 2010 by heritageTHE MURMUR of young students reciting the Qur'an wafts through the hallways of this remote village school. It's a familiar sound in the crumbling classrooms of rural Pakistan, where students often memorize Islam's holy book without learning its lessons.
But in this isolated mountain valley, three days' drive from Islamabad, students at the Aga Khan Girls' School live in a different world.
Instead of mud brick walls and dirt floors, they sit in a spotless science laboratory. And along with their headscarves, they wear lab coats.
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