Inspiring academic futures with students in Pakistan’s Chitral region

A PER Innovation Fund project

20 March 2023

In this blog, DPhil student Abdul Wahid Khan describes the academic workshops he facilitated for young people in the Chitral District of Pakistan. The project was delivered with support from Reuben’s Public Engagement with Research (PER) Innovation Fund. Find out more about the PER Innovation Fund here.

Chitral Academics Circle (CAC) was created to give academics from the Chitral region of Pakistan a platform for collaboration and for sharing resources and academic opportunities. Its goal is to encourage local researchers to share their wisdom on local issues in the global circle of scholarship.

In 2022, a key part of the CAC project involved connecting with young people in the marginalised rural areas of Chitral to talk to them about academic opportunities and help them to make informed decisions about their academic futures. To engage with students in Chitral, we focused on villages that get the least attention from government and other institutions because of their relative isolation (as well as being geographically remote, many of these regions do not have access to internet or mobile phone services).  We visited both government and private schools and colleges in the villages of Yarkhoon Lasht, Boroghul, Rech, Khot, Shotkhar and Bung to inform these students about academic opportunities and to motivate them to apply for such opportunities. We talked about different academic scholarships that are available to students through various organisations and universities and we shared our own experiences of higher education in Pakistan and abroad. Another aspect of our workshops dealt with making informed decisions about academic pathways. Acknowledging that everyone has different aspirations and passions, we developed a toolkit to help students make decisions based on their own interests. Furthermore, we offered different group activities to get the students thinking about the various steps that they should take before making an informed decision. We collected feedback from the participants at the end of each workshop and were happy to see that many of the students felt more confident about choosing academic opportunities and applying for them in the future.

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map of chitral

 

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We are very grateful to the Reuben PER project for helping us travel to these places and for providing the mentorship to execute the project. The locations we visited are quite far from each other and a lot of resources is needed to get to each of the villages. Meetings with our mentor helped us to think through the project and execute it in the best way possible. I am very grateful to my dear friend Fida Hussain, Program Officer AKYSB Upper Chitral, who helped me with the logistics and connecting with the students and school administration. It was a great learning experience for me as I had never visited these regions of my home country and it exposed me to the great talent that is out there, but also to the lack of resources available to students in the rural areas. I also enjoyed planning the activities and designing according to the age groups of the participants which certainly was a challenge but also a great learning experience. As I am from the same rural region of the students who we visited, I was able to tell the students that if I was able to avail different opportunities and make it to the University of Oxford, so could they. As I saw in the feedback, this point really stayed with the participants, and I am grateful to have given that hope to young people.

This is just the first step in our mission to reach more students in the marginalised regions of Chitral and Pakistan and motivate them towards their academic journey. Next year I am planning to organise a more advanced workshop on Decolonial Academic Writing for university students in Chitral and provide them with the resources and ideas to write about Chitral from a local perspective (as most of the material available on Chitral comes from the colonial sources). There will be many other such events in the future that will engage the young people of Chitral in healthy academic discussions and activities.