Pakistan - Education for Girls - Efforts to Restore

Gunmen have wounded a 14-year-old rights activist who has campaigned for girls' education in the Swat Valley in north-west

Pakistan

Malala Yousafzai was attacked on her way home from school in Mingora, the region's main town.

She came to public attention in 2009 by writing a diary for BBC Urdu about life under Taliban militants who had taken control of the valley.

Ehsanullah Ehsan told BBC Urdu that they attacked her because she was anti-Taliban and secular, adding that she would not be spared.

Malala Yousafzai was travelling with at least one other girl when she was shot, but there are differing accounts of how events unfolded.

The chilling attack on the young peace campaigner has been leading TV news bulletins here. Malala Yousafzai is one of the best-known schoolgirls in the country. Young as she is, she has dared to do what many others do not - publicly criticise the Taliban.

Malala's confident, articulate campaign for girls' education has won her admirers - and recognition - at home and abroad. She has appeared on national and international television, and spoken of her dream of a future

Pakistan

where education would prevail.

Even by the standards of blood-soaked

Pakistan

, there has been shock at the shooting. It has been condemned by

Pakistan

's Prime Minister, Raja Pervez Ashraf, who sent a helicopter to transfer Malala to hospital in Peshawar.

The head of Pakistan's Independent Human Rights Commission, Zohra Yusuf, said "this tragic attack on this courageous child" sends a very disturbing message to all those working for women and girls.

One report, citing local sources, says a bearded gunman stopped a car full of schoolgirls, and asked for Malala Yousafzai by name, before opening fire.

But a police official also told BBC Urdu that unidentified gunmen opened fire on the schoolgirls as they were about to board a van or bus.

She was hit in the head and, some reports say, in the neck area by a second bullet, but is now in hospital and is reportedly out of danger. Another girl who was with her at the time was also injured.

Malala Yousafzai was just 11 when she was writing her diary, two years after the Taliban took over the Swat Valley, and ordered girls' schools to close.

In the diary, which she kept for the BBC's Urdu service under a pen name, she exposed the suffering caused by the militants as they ruled.

She used the pen-name Gul Makai when writing the diary. Her identity only emerged after the Taliban were driven out of Swat and she later won a national award for bravery and was also nominated for an international children's peace award.

Correspondents say she earned the admiration of many across

Pakistan

for her courage in speaking out about life under the brutal rule of Taliban militants.

One poignant entry reflects on the Taliban decree banning girls' education: "Since today was the last day of our school, we decided to play in the playground a bit longer. I am of the view that the school will one day reopen but while leaving I looked at the building as if I would not come here again."

She has since said that she wants to study law and enter politics when she grows up. "I dreamt of a country where education would prevail," she said.

The BBC's Orla Guerin in Islamabad says that Malala Yousafzai was a public figure who didn't shy away from risks and had strong support from her parents for her activism. Indeed, her father, who is a school teacher, expressed his pride in her campaigning.

In a statement about the attack, Pakistani Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf said: "We have to fight the mindset that is involved in this. We have to condemn it... Malala is like my daughter, and yours too. If that mindset prevails, then whose daughter would be safe?"

“At that time some of us would go to school in plain clothes, not in school uniform, just to pretend we are not students, and we hid our books under our shawls.”

The Taliban, under the notorious militant cleric Maulana Fazlullah, took hold of the Swat Valley in late 2007 and remained in de facto control until they were driven out by Pakistani military forces during an offensive in 2009.

While in power they closed girls' schools, promulgated Sharia law and introduced measures such as banning the playing of music in cars.

Since they were ejected, there have been isolated militant attacks in Swat but the region has largely remained stable and many of the thousands of people who fled during the Taliban years have returned.

A government operation to drive out militants has seen a gradual return to the classrooms in a district where more than 400 schools were destroyed, 70% of them girls' schools.

'Educate one girl and you educate a household' ... teacher Gul-e-Khandana.

In a rundown building in the mountain village of Sijban, girls sit at their desks, hair loosely covered in white or black scarves, staring raptly at their teacher. They say they want to become either doctors or teachers when they grow up. This is the one government primary school for girls in the Swat valley that was spared destruction by the Taliban. Their headteacher, Gul-e-Khandana, is no ordinary teacher – she stood up to the Taliban and managed to save the school where she had taught for more than 20 years.

She still shudders as she recalls what happened: "A group of Taliban arrived with Kalashnikovs at the school building just before the school holidays in June 2008. I ran out and told them: 'You will have to kill me first before you torch my school'. They called me a kaffir [non-believer] and said they would be back."

The Taliban had already destroyed the nearby girls' middle school so, fearing the worst, Gul-e-Khandana removed the furniture and school records to her home. The girls had already stopped coming to school. But Gul-e-Khandana was determined. She was denounced on the radio, which was controlled by the militants. Her neighbours stopped talking to her and her extended family broke off all ties.

When the military operation began to flush out the Taliban from Swat later that year, Gul-e-Khandana fled, smuggling the school records under her burka. "Everyone thought I was crazy but I thought one day the Taliban will leave and we will re-open the school and the girls will come back. I wanted to keep the certificates and records."

With the army operation completed, Gul-e-Khandana returned to Sijban in July 2009 and went straight to her school. "It was still standing! I was so delighted. I had feared the worst but out of the six classrooms only one room had been destroyed by mortar shells." With the building more or less intact, she re-opened the school. "Many of the girls were still too terrified to come back to school and I started a committee with the help of the army that went from one household to another to convince the parents to send their daughters back to school." Today there are 262 pupils enrolled in her school, more than before the Taliban came to Swat.

Other schools in the area, such as the middle school for girls in Shinkat, a village near the capital of Swat, were not so lucky. The school was completely destroyed by the Taliban in 2009. Salma, 17, recalls the day it was attacked. "It happened around 1 o'clock in the morning. I heard the blast. It made me very sad and I cried."

Today, Salma is back at her newly constructed school in Shinkat and says she wants to be a doctor. Her teacher, Shanaz, says that now the Taliban have left the valley, enrolment is increasing. "More girls are coming back and many want to go on to college. There is a change; parents are willing to encourage their daughters. As for the girls, you can see the happiness on their faces, they are so happy to be back in a proper school again. Many lost almost two years of their studies."

The Taliban destroyed more than 400 of the 1,576 schools in Swat. "Seventy percent of them were girls' schools," recalls Ensaullah Khan, who serves on the board of the Sarhad rural support programme, an NGO that is helping to rebuild schools. "Then as the conflict with the government intensified they started destroying both boys' schools as well as girls' schools. It was a terrible time. How can you build a nation without education?"

This is a question many people are asking in Pakistan, after the Annual Status of Education report, published in February this year, revealed that nearly 60% of school-age children can't read. Girls fare the worst.

Another report, by the Pakistan Education Task Force in 2011, showed that Pakistan is second in the global ranking of out-of-school children. One in three rural women have never attended school.

Education in Pakistan is chronically underfunded. And the Taliban continues to strike in other parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. There are no official figures but estimates suggest more than 800 schools have been destroyed in north-west Pakistan.

Maryam Bibi, founder of the NGO Khwendo Kor, which has been working for girls' education in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province since 1993, is one of several who see the importance of educating girls. "We talk about equality and women's rights and welfare at the policy level, but what is the strategy, especially for poor girls living in remote areas? We must educate these girls – then you are automatically ensuring that their health improves and that later on they have fewer unplanned pregnancies."

Her organisation focuses on remote areas where no schools exist yet. "The villagers themselves have given us space to run these schools for the young girls in the community and we try to involve the mothers as well by offering them short courses to improve their literacy levels. We are only working in remote areas where there are very few schools and opportunities. We try to find an educated girl in the village and then give her training and funding to run the school. So far, we are running around 150 schools on our own, but our funding is decreasing. We want the government to eventually take over these schools."

Gul-e-Khandana believes that girls are the future for Pakistan. "Above all, girls must be educated," she says. "When one girl is educated, she educates her entire household. The role of women is very important in our society – it is they who can change our way of life for the better."

Khan agrees that schooling is the answer. "With education, we can change our future. We can save the people from falling into the hands of extremists. We can empower them."

This report was supplied by Panos, a global network of eight not-for-profit institutes that share the goal of increasing the participation of poor and marginalised people in international development debates through the media and other kinds of communication.