Kashf Foundation launches Education Finance Programme

Kashf Foundation has launched Education Finance Programme that offers credit facilities to low-cost private schools (LCPS) with teachers' capacity-building and school-management trainings. According to Foundation's Managing Director Roshaneh Zafar, 58 percent of schools are without toilets while 64 percent don't have access to water. There is one teacher available for 37 students while 18 percent of teachers remain absent every day.
As many as 46 percent of students remain unable to read in Urdu at the end of primary education. Pakistan faces an "education quality" issue in public schools, mainly due to insufficient government investment in the sector. As a result, private schools have become omnipresent in Pakistan.
Seeing the gap in the market, the Kashf Foundation came up to finance low-cost private schools in the country. It includes pedagogy training, roles and responsibilities of a teacher, effect of teachers' belief, values and attitude on teaching practices, lesson planning, and class management trainings. Schools owners are supported in quality education, health, hygiene and safety issues as well as sustainable financial practices and human resource management.
The programme focuses on underserved or marginalised communities located in semi-urban and urban markets. The minimum enrolment of schools is 80 students at the time of loan appraisal out of which 40 percent must be female. The selected schools are operating on less than Rs 1,200 in class fees per month which is approximately the middle to low range of the LCPS market, and must be operational for at least one year to ascertain that the schools are not running for some other agenda (including links with fundamentalist groups).
This product was piloted in 2012, and now covers over 1,100 schools in Punjab and Sindh, which means over 1,800 school owners and 4,500 school teachers have been trained and approximately 570,000 students benefited through this programme. The outcome of these efforts is increased enrolment by 69 percent in schools, 15 percent increase in schools with a library, and an 18 percent increase in schools with first aid boxes and 29 percent schools have a clear emergency exit marked.