The Citizen's Foundation wins UNESCO's Prestigious Prize for Literacy
The foundation won the prize for its 'community engagement and online literacy program empowering girls and women in Pakistan'. Photo: Twitter
(Web Desk) – “Aagahi Literacy Programme for Women and Out of School Girls” won UNESCO’s Confucius Prize for Literacy-2017.
The award ceremony was witnessed by diplomats, UNESCO delegates, Members of the French civil society and media persons in large number. Citizen Foundation of Pakistan received the award in recognition of its services for raising awareness and imparting basic literacy skills to the women and out of school girls through its special online digital platform.
According to APP, Director General UNESCO Irina Bokova gave away the prestigious prize to Amna Wahid Khalid, Executive Advisor and Assad Stud Ahmad, CEO of the Citizens Foundation awards ceremony held at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris on Friday, a message received here said.
UNESCO awarded 2017 Confucius Prize for Literacy to
— Musadaq Zulqarnain (@MusadaqZ) September 9, 2017
The Citizens Foundation 4 its Aagahi Literacy Programme for Women & Out-of-School Girls pic.twitter.com/LJ54pnJHaa
The Citizens Foundation (TCF) is a professionally managed, non-profit organization set up in 1995 by a group of citizens who wanted to bring about positive social change through education. TCF is now one of Pakistan’s leading organisations in the field of education for the less privileged, running over 1400 schools with enrolment of around 204,000 students.
“The inspiration for starting an adult literacy programme emerged from the gap in home-school communication as mothers could not read or write, and teachers had no way of reliably communicating with parents,” said Amna Waheed Khalid, the Executive Advisor at The Citizens Foundation during the prize ceremony.
TCF’s “Aagahi Literacy Programme for Women and Out of School Girls” won the prize for being one of the most successful community development initiatives focusing on adult literacy for women in the country.
TCF’s Aagahi initiative have concentrated on Literacy in a Digital World. Photo: TCF website
The Citizen’s Foundation Agahi program concentrated on ‘Literacy in a Digital World’. Aaghi was recognised on the basis of its effectiveness and successful use of technology and digital tools for monitoring and evaluating the programme.
According to the press release issued by UNESCO s official website, TCF’s initiative - Aagahi, now in its 12th year has successfully reached out to more than 59,000 women in Pakistan. The programme has successfully empowered women with well-versed Urdu language – reading and writing and basic numeracy skills. The skills have brought in positive impacts on the everyday lives of women, who are able to read bus numbers, to calculate during shopping and writing basic details including their names.
The digital platforms open up new possibilities for literacy learning, but the community engagement is as important to advance literacy. “Literacy course materials can be provided at all private schools, they are ready to be downloaded through the website or ordered online,” said Waheed Khalid “If each literate person over the age of 15 years were to teach only one other illiterate person, we would eradicate illiteracy in less than a year.”
An ‘Aagahi’ student, Gul Bano, who mobilised other women and girls in her community to enroll and whose daughter is now a teacher at one of the schools of The Citizens Foundation, stressed on the importance of literacy teaching and learning.
“Everyone feels the need and the will to be literate, but only a few get this opportunity,” he said. “The challenges are the lack of schools, poverty, and social taboos on girls’ education. I think that teaching someone to be literate is a greater service to humanity.”
In terms of the benefits of winning the Prize award and the future of the literacy programme, Waheed Khalid enthusiastically said:
“We have already gotten calls from the Ministry of Education in the Government of Pakistan, wanting to learn more about our literacy programme! The global recognition of our project is such a wonderful and unique opportunity for us to mobilise national and international support for eradicating illiteracy in Pakistan. We plan to use the prize money to help us scale further while focusing on cost efficiencies through digitisation of training content and better inventory management.”
