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School rebuilt by USAID opens

By Our Correspondent 2014-11-14
MIRPURKHAS: United States Agency for International Development (USAID) senior policy adviser for Sindh and Balochistan Dr Randy Hatfield has said that the aim of the agency`s development programmes, particularly in the education sector, is to strengthen US-Pakistan relations.

`We are also working in the health sector, focusing on mother and child healthcare programmes, in Pakistan,` he said while spealcing as the chief guest at a ceremony held here on Thursday for the inauguration of the Govt Boys Primary School, Dost Mohammad Maher.

The school has been rehabilitated by the USAID after it, along with many others, was destroyed in the 2011 floods in Sindh.

Dr Hatfield said that the USAID had completed a $10 million project under which government schools destroyed by floods in 2010 and 2011 in four districts of Sindh and two districts of Balochistan were reconstructed and rehabilitated. The 36 rehabilitated schools are situated in Mirpurkhas, Sanghar, Umerkot, Tando Allahyar Jaffarabad and Naseerabad. He said it was one of the many development projects undertaken by the USAID in the country for the benefit of millions of Pakistanis.

Besides helping 10,000 girls to resume their studies, the agency provided assistance in making available furniture, solar panels, clean drinking water and sanitation facilities and otheressentials atthese schools,he added.

Mirpurkhas school education director Syed Rasool Bukhsh Shah, speaking at the ceremony, said that the school inaugurated today was named after a local landowner, Dost Mohammed Maher, who had donated the land for the school in 1989. A total of 817 boys and girls are now enrolled at the school, according to him.

Dr Hatfield said that the agency had extended an aid of $155 million to the Sindh government for its basic education programme, out of which $81 million were earmarked for the construction of120 schools in seven districts including Karachi.