Pakistan Overview
With ongoing fighting between the Pakistani government and Taliban forcing millions of people to flee their homes, the country’s women’s rights and educational hurdles have emerged as top issues in a nation where only 36 percent of women can read. Please join us this month to learn about a few of ActionAid’s projects in Pakistan designed to stamp out poverty and discrimination. During this difficult time, initiatives to aid the country’s poor people and the bright face of an 11-year-old girl named Malalay offer hope for brighter tomorrow.
Work Continues to Meet Displaced Pakistanis' Immediate Needs
Voices of Pakistan's Displaced
Malalay: A Pakistani Girl Speaks Out in Swat
Pakistani Women Face Steep Climb Toward Achieving Equal Rights
Since it gained independence from Great Britain and split from its mostly Hindu neighbor, India, in 1947, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan has struggled with violence and cultural clashes. Tensions between Pakistan and India, its eastern neighbor, have escalated into war on several occasions and the border it shares with Afghanistan has become a refuge for people fleeing their homes, as well as the Taliban. Iran, which Pakistan touches in the southwest, has been a further source of contention.
Although Pakistan has had its share of external strife, it is the country’s internal challenges that drew ActionAid to set up shop here in 1992 to work directly with the nation’s poor people on a host of issues from women’s rights to education.
We worked, for instance, to repeal the Hudood Ordinance, which until 2006 could punish a woman for sex outside of marriage if she had been raped but failed to produce four male witnesses.
Still, Pakistani law dictates that female children inherit half as much as their brothers, while wives are entitled to only one-eighth of their husbands’ estate — and they often receive far less.
Workforce discrimination is routine, and some women among rural tribes are secluded from any male older than 14.
Education, a top ticket out of poverty, is unavailable for many. Although it is girls whose education is violently restricted in Taliban-controlled areas, the overall literacy rate hovers around 50 percent.
These problems affect Pakistanis’ daily lives and complicate efforts to resolve the current crisis that has displaced millions of people from their homes.
But despite these challenges, we are seeing progress and reasons for optimism every day as women find their voice and communities rally behind education.
Every month in 2009, ActionAid will introduce you to our work by featuring one of the 50 countries we work in. We know it can be overwhelming when contemplating the challenges faced by poor people and communities around the world. It can be even more difficult to understand how you can have a role in solutions to global poverty.
But there is hope. With assistance from supporters and activists, ActionAid is making day-to-day life better for millions of the world’s poorest citizens while also working to eradicate the fundamental causes of poverty, project by project, policy by policy.