ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – The families of more than 3 million poor children in Pakistan will receive cash stipends if their children go to school, the government said as officials mark ed “Malala Day” yesterday in support of a schoolgirl shot by the Taliban. U.N. officials declared Malala Day one month after 15-year-old Malala Yousufzai and [...]

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Pakistan marks “Malala Day”

Programme to provide schools with stipends for three million poor children
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ISLAMABAD (Reuters) – The families of more than 3 million poor children in Pakistan will receive cash stipends if their children go to school, the government said as officials mark ed “Malala Day” yesterday in support of a schoolgirl shot by the Taliban.

Malala Yousufzai reads a book as she recuperates at the The Queen Elizabeth Hospital (Reuters)

U.N. officials declared Malala Day one month after 15-year-old Malala Yousufzai and two of her classmates were shot by the Pakistan Taliban. She had been targeted for speaking out against the insurgency. In the days following the shooting, Yousufzai became an international icon and world leaders pledged to support her campaign for girls’ education. She is now recovering in a British hospital.

On Friday, Pakistani president Asif Zardari added his signature to petitions signed by more than a million people urging Pakistan to pay stipends to families who put their girls in school in honor of Malala.

“Malala’s dreams represent what is best about Pakistan,” said former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown as he presented the petitions to President Zardari.

On Friday, the government announced that poor families will now receive $2 a month per child in primary school.

The program will be funded by the World Bank and Britain and distributed through the government’s Benazir Income Support Programme, designed to give small cash payments to needy families. The families in the programme already receive $10 a month for basic expenditure.

After a stipend programme was put in place in Pakistan’s Punjab province, a World Bank study found a nine percent increase in girls’ enrolment over two years, said Alaphia Zoyab, the South Asia campaigner for internet activist group Avaaz.

Pakistan is struggling to overcome widespread poverty, a Taliban insurgency and massive, endemic corruption. Less than 0.57 percent of Pakistan’s 180 million citizens pay income tax, money that the government could use to educate poor children.

Instead, the Pakistani government relies on foreign donors to fund many social programs. Britain is due to spend around $1 billion on helping Pakistan educate poor children by 2015.

Shot on a school bus

MINGORA, Pakistan, Nov 10 (AFP) -The two schoolgirls wounded in a Taliban murder attempt on teenage Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai said Saturday they were still haunted by the memory of the bloody attack.

Speaking to AFP on the UN-declared “Malala Day” of global action to support the young campaigner and call for better schooling for girls, 16-year-old Riaz said the October 9 attack still made her afraid.

“I am still terrified. I still get tears in my eyes whenever I think of that incident. I saw Malala in the pool of blood in front of me with my eyes,” she told AFP.

“I am proud that I am her close friend and the whole world is commemorating international day for her, but I would be much happier if she was here with us today,” she told AFP.

She said the Taliban attack had made her even more determined to go to school. “The shooting tried to stop us from getting an education — it was our test and we must pass it,” she said




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