Listening lies at the core of Focusing Initiatives International’s approach to community wellness. We do not come into a community with preconceived ideas of what we think they need. Instead we rely on the wisdom of the local community to define their needs and propose solutions.
Our Brighter Tomorrow initiative continues to actively embody this principle.
The economic crisis brought on by the Covid pandemic forced small businesses in Peshawar, Pakistan to lay off employees and replace them with cheaper child laborers. Unable to afford school fees, the unemployed parents had to remove their children from school and put them to work, sometimes at their parents’ original place of employment.
Brighter Tomorrow was conceived, designed, and implemented by members of the community it serves. With the support of FII in partnership with FSR (a Peshawar-based organization), this project provides out-of-school child laborers with two hours a day of basic literacy and numeracy education, and psychosocial support with a strong emphasis on critical thinking skills.
Designed as a replicable model, Brighter Tomorrow offers these children a chance to break free from the cycle of unskilled labor by equipping them with foundational education and life skills, including critical thinking, self-awareness, and emotional resilience.
And the listening continues. The children are directly involved in researching and planning school trips (to a local park, to the zoo). Teachers are trained in Focusing skills to help them be responsive to individual children’s needs. And now we are improving our teacher trainings further in response to a conversation with a bright child considered a “slow learner” in math.
In Pakistan, teachers are trained to put such children at the back of the room and to give preference to the children who do well. Children who are labeled “slow” are neglected and face a loss of confidence, so that the label “slow learner” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. This system is a relic of 19th century colonialism.
But at Brighter Tomorrow we listen. And we discovered that the bright child seated at the back of the room found memorizing his times tables boring. He told us that he could see no connection between mathematics and the work he did when he was not in school. We realized that our teachers’ old school training had left serious gaps. They had learned how to convey abstract skills, but not to convey the practical importance of subjects like mathematics.
We addressed this by explaining to the children how multiplication could be used to figure profit and loss, to measure car parts, set prices, and protect themselves from being cheated. Suddenly math became relevant to their daily lives and occupations, and the so-called “slow learners” quickly excelled and sometimes even surpassed their peers who had been considered “fast learners.”
Brighter Tomorrow is now developing a series of teacher trainings to help our teaching staff unlearn outdated, colonial-era methods and adopt innovative, student-centered approaches that foster creativity and independent thinking. The teachers are learning to ask themselves for each subject they teach: “Why am I teaching this? What does it have to do with these children’s lives?” These simple questions can bridge the educational divide and play a transformative role in empowering children trapped in child labor. We hope this model may reach beyond the doors of Brighter Tomorrow and become instrumental in reshaping the educational landscape in Pakistan to transform the lives of all “slow” children now neglected by centuries-old teaching methods.