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Pakistani students helped by the Hidaya Foundation to attend school. Only three percent of Pakistani girls graduate from high school.
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By Carolyn Schuk
What did you spend yesterday on lunch? Maybe $10? $20? Did you know that your lunch money would pay for month of high school tuition for a Pakistani girl?
While $10 or $15 a month may not seem like a lot of money to middle class Americans, for desperately poor Pakistanis it’s an insurmountable obstacle that bars the schoolhouse door for the majority of Pakistan’s school age girls.
“Of girls who enter the first grade, only three percent finish the 12th grade,” explains Waseem Baloch, President and founder of the Santa Clara-based Muslim social welfare non-profit, Hidaya Foundation.
“Poor parents keep girls home to help keep boys in school. Approximately 75 percent of girls never see a classroom in their lives. [In rural areas] the average literacy rate for women is three percent.”
The national literacy rate for Pakistani women is not much better: only 12 percent, according to the World Education Forum.
But Baloch isn’t wasting time wringing his hands over grim statistics. Like the proverbial mustard seed that can move mountains, he’s hard at work tackling root causes of illiteracy and poverty.
Women’s education is close to Baloch’s heart. He expects to support the educations of 10,000 young Pakistani women this year alone.
“If we have literate mothers, we have a literate nation,” he explains. “I was influenced by my mother. I have the example of my own mother.”
A native of a Shikarpur District in central Pakistan, Baloch is one of six children of poor, but educated, parents. Early in Baloch’s life, the family moved to a larger city to ensure better educational opportunities for the children.
Baloch was educated as an engineer and came to the U.S. in 1982, earning an M.S. in Material Science from Michigan State University. After working for many years in the Southern California Aerospace industry, the Internet boom brought him to the Bay Area in the mid 1990s, where he worked in supply quality management for 3Com.
In 1997 he started Hidaya from his home. The name is a play on the Arabic words Hidaya and Haddiyah, meaning “guidance” and “gift” respectively. The non-profit quickly became Baloch’s second job.
“I used to go to work, spend time with my wife and daughters,” he recalls. “When everybody went to bed, my second job, my non-profit world started. I used to not take any time off from work and take my vacation and two weeks unpaid leave to go to Pakistan and set up the Hidaya infrastructure there.”
When 3Com moved its manufacturing operation from California to Mexico in late 2000, Baloch treated the shutdown as an opportunity to turn his after-hours non-profit into a fulltime vocation.
The first year was hard. “It was still a small organization, the economy was bad, it was hard to pay the rent,” he recalls. “So I volunteered at Hidaya for 13 months so we could survive the bad times.”
Since that time, Hidaya has grown dramatically. The bare-bones four-person staff with a handful of PCs in a tiny strip mall office manages an annual budget that has grown to over $4 million and a staff of more than 20 in Pakistan.
The non-profit’s focus in on education and social welfare in economically depressed areas; programs like ongoing earthquake relief share the stage with efforts like the girls’ education project targeting root causes of poverty.
Although Baloch no longer works as an engineer, engineering discipline informs Hidaya’s operations from top to bottom. “It helps me tremendously,” he explains.
Every single one of the organization’s processes and procedures are fully documented. Baloch flowcharts every activity. In fact, everything is so clearly documented and structured that Hidaya could satisfy the industrial strength quality standards of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
This attention to infrastructure and process is key to Hidaya’s mission, keeping expenses at a minimum and assuring donors that their contributions are properly used.
“We would like to expand to different cities in different countries,” he explains. “[Local people in] every city manage their own projects. Every process is clearly laid out. You can have a person anywhere and they know exactly what to do.”
Baloch also applies his manufacturing procurement knowledge to Hidaya’s supply chain. “In our sourcing we use the same standards as corporate purchasing departments.”
These standards also apply to aid recipients. “We have rigorous screening accountability and security,” he says, which includes background checks. “We are very careful about making sure support doesn’t go to ‘wrong’ elements.”
Closing the accountability loop, Baloch requires a completion report for every single project and case.
Hidaya’s successes also demonstrate how planting a mustard seed like education can move mountains more effectively than head-on attacks against ingrained attitudes. Take for example, Kulsoom Baloch (no relation) who is in charge of Hidaya’s programs in Pakistan. “It’s a miracle to see in a village where parents don’t let their girls go out, she has an MBA,” Baloch says.
“When I started Hidaya, there was a poor girl whose father had a total household income of $40 a month,” he continues. “She completed 12th grade [through Hidaya’s help]. Two days back I received a card from her. She’s in the IT department with the government. The whole family’s status in society has changed. She can take care of her parents.”
Carolyn Schuk can be reached at cschuk@earthlink.net
