ISLAMABAD: The United Nations special rapporteurs have expressed concern over militant attacks on girls’ schools in Pakistan and urged the government to safeguard the inalienable right of women and girls to a safe and secure education. “We are alarmed by the ongoing terror attacks against girls’ schools by organisations who are against the education of women and girls. We note that all attacks on schools are abhorrent, but that targeted attacks against girls’ schools
Child Rights in Focus
PESHAWAR: The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa health department has expressed concern over the Benazir Income Support Programme’s decision to hand over the Benazir Nashonuma Programme (BNP) to non-governmental organisations in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and said it should be allowed to continue carrying out the anti-malnutrition initiative to support the health of poverty-stricken mothers and infant children. The programme is meant to address pregnancy-related issues and ensure healthy growth of children up to the age of two years,
The NCRC collaborated with Meta and the Digital Rights Foundation for the Youth Online Safety Roundtable held in Islamabad. Member KP, Miss Nadia Bibi, and the NCRC team participated in the discussion. The discussion aimed to foster youth online safety by addressing challenges specific to Pakistan’s context, with a focus on strengthening parent-teen communication and customizing Meta’s safety tools and policies to meet local needs. Additionally, emphasis was placed on NCRC’s potential role in
ISLAMABAD: The Regional Reference Laboratory for Polio Eradication at the National Institute of Health (NIH) has confirmed the detection of wild poliovirus type 1 (WPV1) in environmental samples collected from 10 already infected districts. According to a lab official, sewage samples collected from Gwadar, Sibi, Khuzdar, Dukki, Hub, Lasbela, Noshki, Bannu, D.I. Khan, and Lahore were found positive for WPV1. “When polio virus is found in the sewage sample of a district, it is
At least 50 children have died in Parachinar due to the recent shortage of medicines caused by the closure of roads leading to the city in the aftermath of armed violence between warring tribes last month in the restive Kurram tribal district, officials said. Thousands of people have been stranded in Parachinar because of clashes that have killed at least 130 people since last month. Residents have reported food and medicine shortages in parts of the Kurram district,
PESHAWAR: The district administration here on 22 December 2024 issued a directive making polio vaccination certificates mandatory for obtaining official documents, including birth, marriage, divorce, and death certificates, in the city’s seven tehsils. According to a notification, applicants must provide a confirmation certificate from the District Health Office (DHO) verifying that polio drops had been administered to their children. The village and neighbourhood councils are barred from issuing certificates without obtaining a no-objection certificate
Rawalpindi: Pneumonia, which is considered as the number one killer of children in Pakistan has started hitting the population in this region of the country as the number of cases being reported at the allied hospitals in town is on a continuous rise since the advent of winter this year. Data collected by ‘The News’ on Sunday has revealed that in the last three weeks, well over 2500 child patients with pneumonia have been
CHILDREN constitute around 45 percent of the Pakistani population, with 22.7pc adolescents from 10 to 19 years. Along with their educational, safety and physical health needs, there is also an urgent need to prevent and respond to their mental health challenges. The WHO estimates that 15pc of the global burden of disease among 10-to19-year-olds is due to mental disorders. Globally, one out of seven children in this age group experiences some form of mental
Madressah reform continues to be a major challenge. Since the state is not in a position to outrightly ban madressahs and immediately replace them with regular schools, attempts to mainstream them by encouraging them to incorporate worldly subjects are widely considered the only other alternative. However, actual enrolment trends seem to go against this conventional wisdom. Moreover, attempts to convince madressahs in Pakistan to include worldly knowledge in their curriculum have a long history,
SHANGLA: Two neighbours assaulted a nine-year-old boy and filmed the act in Dehrai of Alpuri tehsil here. The police have arrested the two accused. Alpuri police station SHO Mohammad Arif Khan said that the victim along with his father reported to the police on December 21 that he was returning from his aunt’s home when Nasibur Rehman called him to a shop owned by Azan Ahmad. “When I went inside the shop, both Nasib
KARACHI: A judicial magistrate on 21 December granted bail to six suspects arrested a day before in Korangi for allegedly attacking a polio team with shovels. The investigating officer of the case brought the six suspects — Amna, Iqra and Ibrahim, alias Faizan (all juvenile suspects) and Samina Khan, Mahjabeen Suleman and Gul Imran — before the judicial magistrate (East), seeking their police remand for further interrogation. The IO informed the court that they had hurt
IN 2019, when I was teaching full time, our institute collaborated with a university in Canada in their Global Reporting Programme where three of our students, along with students in Kenya and the US, were selected to work on an academic year-long project. The three students and I would log on at 9 pm on Zoom — before that became a thing — for a three-hour weekly class. That year’s theme was on how