Marium Amjad Khan, Education Champion

Advocating to increase government spending on girls’ education

The Issue

The issue

More than five million girls are out of school in Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province. The majority of these out-of-school girls live in the southern region of Punjab, where there are not enough girls’ schools due to lack of government investment. Poverty levels in the southern districts increase rates of child labour, which also prevents girls from going to school.

Marium Amjad’s approach

Policy Reform

Because Marium’s parents were firm believers in gender equality, growing up she assumed every girl had the same opportunities she did. It wasn’t until Marium started volunteering in other areas of Pakistan that she realised many girls in the country aren’t able to go to school. For the last 10 years, Marium has worked to improve access to education for girls in Pakistan. As a project manager at Awaz Foundation Pakistan, she leads the organisation’s advocacy and mass mobilisation work to support marginalised communities.

With her Malala Fund grant, Marium advocates to increase government spending on girls’ education in the southern region of Punjab through meetings with policymakers, media outreach and community organising.

Marium Amjad’s impact

With the Awaz Foundation, Marium trained 14 young advocates to discuss the barriers to education in southern Punjab — including lack of girls’ school and high rates of child labour — and how allocating more money to the education budget could help address these issues. The Awaz Foundation advocates then met with over 50 parliamentarians representing the southern districts of Punjab. After their conversations, the parliamentarians said they would support financing of girls’ education on the floor of the house and in their communities. Several then visited their local girls’ schools to assess the situation and raised the issue of investing in girls’ education on the parliament floor.

All 28 members of the South Punjab Legislatures Core Group (LCG), a group of parliamentarians formed by Awaz Foundation, signed commitments to help increase investment in girls’ education in the southern region of Punjab. As a result, the parliament is now discussing the issue of girls’ education more often on the floor.