The Orenda Project: Using Cartoons to spread education in Pakistan.

> A graduate of Georgetown University in Qatar (GU-Q) is set to expand a small educational startup from a pilot program that digitally streams a high quality curriculum to classrooms of four and five year olds, to a large scale program that brings education to the millions of out of school children in Pakistan. Haroon Yasin, who graduated from Georgetown last year, first developed the innovative school project titled “Orenda” with a team of classmates as a senior. Following graduation, his project to build sustainable classrooms in slums faced a major obstacle: the Pakistani government began to demolish the slums and relocate the very people he was trying to help, most of whom were refugees from Afghanistan. To overcome such an obstacle, it was decided to move the classroom to a place where natural disasters and government policies would have less disruptive impact: online. Taking advantage of the opportunities online access offered, Haroon, with his small team of dedicated partners, decided to transform the formal government school curriculum to a digital format that was flexible, inexpensive, and that would catch the attention of children under the pressure of poverty to begin working early. Starting in April, Haroon and his team plan to launch a campaign drive to fund the expansion of the successful pilot program, which already enrolls 72 students in Islamabad, to bring education to 500 more students by the end of the year, with an eye towards partnering with Pakistan’s education ministry to explore even broader implementation possibilities.   Article provided by GU-Q.