Monthly Archives: February 2010

ASR must be kept alive

By Zubeida Mustafa
Source: Dawn

Institutions must not be allowed to die. And if they are institutions whose primary function is to educate, it is all the more important that they be kept alive.

But on the cards is the death of a centre that has educated 12,000 women in feminism and many more who have attended its short-term workshops. Lahore`s ASR [`impact`, in Urdu] will run out of funds in October and its executive director, Nighat Said Khan, says she will pack up if no one comes to bail the institution out.
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Remembering Chris Abbas

By Zubeida Mustafa
Source: Dawn

A YEAR ago, on Feb 19, 2009 Christian Zainab Abbas “slipped into the past”, to borrow her own phrase from a poem she wrote five months before her death. Ever since I had wanted to write about Chris, as I had always called her since she walked into my office at

Dawn with an article she had written for the paper several years ago.
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Seeking Inclusion and Opportunity, the Disabled Confront Pakistan’s Myriad Challenges

By Zubeida Mustafa
Source: The WIP

In Pakistan, people with disabilities are generally missing from public places such as shopping malls, restaurants and even universities. But it’s not that the country doesn’t have its share of the disabled; on the contrary, their numbers are estimated to be 16 million. So why are they invisible?

Education needs assessment

By Zubeida Mustafa
Source: Dawn

The Pakistan Education Task Force (PETF) has now been constituted and we have been told that it is a short-term body that has been created to address the issue of access to and quality of school education.

Shehnaz Wazir Ali, the co-chairperson — the other is Sir Michael Barber, the British education consultant — has said that the PETF will identify clear goals for improving the school system.
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Children and libraries

By Zubeida Mustafa
Source: Dawn

PAKISTANI society is full of contradictions. While the book reading and purchasing habit has begun to pick up as has been confirmed by many in the book trade, libraries still lag behind.

The few that exist are now chock-a-block. The reading room in the Rangoonwala Hall in Karachi is open 24/7. Yet the law of supply and demand does not seem to be at work in the expansion of libraries for adults.
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