23rd November 2016, Lahore: Kashf Foundation, one of Pakistan’s leading microfinance institutions, has been awarded the prestigious European Microfinance Award by the Luxembourg Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs. The award is a first-time win for Pakistan and is in recognition of the Foundation’s credit and training facilities to low-cost private schools.
Pakistan suffers from a serious dearth of quality education, especially within the public sector. As a result, the country has seen a rise in low-cost private schools which look to fill the gap left by inadequate equipment and facilities in public sector schools. After extensively researching the needs of low-cost private schools, Kashf Foundation tailored an integrated solution that provides access to finance, school development trainings, and general pedagogy trainings for teachers. To date, the Foundation has serviced over 1,100 schools, trained 4,500 teachers, trained over 1,800 school owners, and positively impacted more than 570,000 students in low-cost private schools across Pakistan with a product unmatched anywhere in the world.
The Award, which highlights the importance of having an innovative approach and structural impact, also acknowledges the creative use of both financial and non-financial tools to improve the quality of the social and economic lives of families and communities.
Ms Roshaneh Zafar, Founder and Managing Director of the Kashf Foundation, expressed her pride in how the Award recognizes the importance of microfinance in reaching the goal of universal education: “Every child deserves a good education, and education provision needs to be child-centric. The Kashf program provides a new way to address quality issues of low-cost private schools and can also provide means of getting more out of school children into schools.” ”
About Kashf Foundation
Kashf Foundation has been working for the economic and social empowerment of women since 1996. It offers a holistic suite of products and services for the financial and non-financial needs of low-income households. Kashf provides low-income households, especially women, access to finance through micro-credit and micro-savings, access to social safety nets via micro-health insurance and life insurance, access to capacity building services such as financial management trainings, business development trainings, and vocational trainings, and access to social advocacy interventions such as mainstream media campaigns, social theatre, and gender justice trainings.
European Microfinance Award
The only one of its kind in the world, the European Microfinance Award was launched in October 2005 by the Directorate for Development Cooperation and Humanitarian Affairs of the Luxembourg Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs to nurture innovative microfinance initiatives. It is jointly organised by the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs, the European Microfinance Platform (e-MFP) and the Inclusive Finance Network Luxembourg (InFiNe.lu).
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