PAKISTAN: Graduates aim to recruit 1,000 new students
Graduates of Don Bosco Technical School Lahore launching new enrollment campaign, aiming for 1,000 new students
(MissionNewswire) Don Bosco Past Pupils from the Don Bosco Technical School in Lahore, Pakistan, launched a campaign to help enroll 1,000 new students for the academic year 2022-2023. Enrollment has been down at the school since the COVID-19 pandemic. The campaign was started at a meeting of Lahore Local Unit members and all agreed to help Don Bosco Lahore. From there, a group of 10 past pupils came together to help promote the school.
The Lahore Local Unit president said, “It was very painful for us to note, that during and after the COVID-19 period, many young people preferred going to any industry as unskilled labor rather than getting technical education from a good educational institution. So, for the past two years we have been watching the number of admissions going down. We were worried, and we thought how we could reverse this trend and help youth from Youhanabad (the largest Christian ‘colony’ in Pakistan where the technical school is also located) to get solid technical education.”
The campaign organizers believe that it’s not just getting more students but also providing quality training that will attract them. Don Bosco Lahore will offer 11 new short courses that last three to six months to help meet this new need. Salesians are also looking at teacher staffing to ensure that they have enough qualified teachers to maintain a good teacher to studio ratio when more students enroll.
The campaign is putting up flyers and turning to social media to help increase enrollment. The Pakistan Catholic and Christian TV channels are also promoting the technical school, and posters and banners have been put up on the streets of Youhanabad. Don Bosco Technical School was founded by the first Salesian missionaries in Pakistan in 1999, and there are close to 4,000 graduates of the school.
According to the World Bank, 31.3 percent of people living in Pakistan fall below the poverty line. Gender plays a role in poverty in the country. Pakistan has traditional gender roles that define a woman’s place in the home and not the workplace. As a result, access to education is challenging for girls and society investments are less. There are few opportunities for women and girls in the country outside of traditional roles. This is evidenced by the disparities in education including the literacy rate. Female literacy in Pakistan is 71.8 percent compared to male literacy at 82.5 percent.
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Sources:
ANS Photo (usage permissions and guidelines must be requested from ANS)
ANS – Pakistan – Past Pupils campaign for Don Bosco Technical School, Lahore
World Bank – Pakistan
Any goods, services or funds provided by Salesian Missions to programs located in this country were administered in compliance with applicable laws and regulations, including sanctions administered by the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control.
