Pehli Kiran Schools Reach 25,000 Children in Pakistan

Why this is here: Pehli Kiran currently enrolls about 3,000 students, and roughly half of them are girls—a deliberate effort to challenge societal norms in conservative communities.

Sabira Navid Qureshi founded the Pehli Kiran School System in Islamabad, Pakistan, in 1995 after seeing a young boy unable to attend school. The nonprofit now operates eight community schools in slum areas, having taught over 25,000 children and currently serving around 3,000 students.

Roughly 35% of Pakistani children ages 5 to 16—about 26 million—are not in school, often due to a lack of birth certificates or illiterate parents unable to navigate the registration process. Pehli Kiran addresses this by enrolling children without documentation and assisting with official registration.

The organization also employs an Accelerated Learning Program, developed with support from Japan, to bring older students up to a fifth-grade level within two years. Recent challenges include the loss of over 1,000 students due to the deportation of Afghan refugees and the threat of school closures caused by slum demolitions, which Pehli Kiran mitigates by using mobile school infrastructure. Continued bureaucratic hurdles and displacement remain obstacles to reaching more children.