Many girls in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have been forced away from education during the pandemic

For almost two weeks last summer, Saliha and Sabira Rehman watched their father fight Covid in a hospital in their hometown in Mardan District, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. At the time, the pandemic was at its peak in Pakistan, and the girls stood by helplessly as their father, Ghan Rehmani, struggled to overcome his symptoms. He quietly succumbed to the disease at the end of May.

Rehman was a security guard in a private school near Qazi Abad, his village in Mardan. He was the sole breadwinner of his family, and funded education for his two daughters – both 12th-grade students in the Government Girls Degree College in Sawaldher and he treatment of his mentally ill son. After the death of their father, the Rehman sisters have had to decide whether to abandon their education to help their family survive. Many young people in Pakistan are already precariously positioned to pursue an education. Families around the country struggle to afford school fees, and fluctuations in income or temporary loss of employment can be enough to cut a child’s education short. The ongoing pandemic has now become part of the long list of things that are keeping Pakistan’s children out of school, as families struggle to cope with the loss of a parent. Girls are often the first to lose out if parents can’t afford school fees. When their father died, the Rehman sisters conferred together about who would stay in school and who would quit to help support the family. At first, they both agreed to leave their college but later decided Sabira would continue her education and Saliha would leave to start working.

It was really a very difficult decision for me to say goodbye to the college, Saliha told The Express Tribune. But there was no other way to fulfill the need of daily home expenses, [my] brother medications, and [my] sister's education. Saliha, 22, is the second oldest child of her family’s four children. Her 25-year-old brother is mentally disabled and her young brother is only eight. Saliha wanted to take her father’s position as a security guard but she knew Pashtun culture would not allow for a woman to do this job. Instead, she sought a job at the same school and was hired to teach first- and second-year students for Rs. 10,000 per month.