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,
Child Rights in Focus
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
THE campaign to eradicate polio from Pakistan cannot succeed unless the safety of vaccinators and security personnel on the front lines of this battle is guaranteed. According to one count, over 200 polio workers and police personnel have been martyred in the field since the 1990s. The latest tragedy occurred only a few days ago when a policeman guarding a polio team in KP’s Karak area was martyred. However, while militant violence forms a
Religious schools, or madrasas, have been integral to the cultural and educational landscape of the subcontinent and the broader Muslim world for centuries. At the time of the independence, around 250 madrasas existed in Pakistan. Since then, these religious institutions have experienced exponential growth, with tens of thousands of them now operating across the country. These madrasas collectively enrol millions of pupils and employ nearly 75,000 teachers. However, a significant proportion of these institutions
ISLAMABAD: A new climate-resilient school, built by ‘Save the Children’ and recently handed over to the provincial education department, has been opened, according to a statement issued by the international aid organisation on 19-December-2024. The school replaces a building that was destroyed in the 2022 floods and is designed to withstand flooding, with high ceilings and increased ventilation to keep students cool during intense heatwaves, and with solar panels to provide sustainable, uninterrupted electricity.
MANSEHRA: Students of the government primary school in Jabori area here are attending classes in the open amid intense cold due to along delay in reconstruction. The five-room multi-storey building was destroyed in a fire in June last year, according to residents. “Even one year and a half after the fire incident, both girls and boys have to study in a miserable condition without proper facilities,” Abdul Wahid Khan told reporters on 20 December