New Delhi: Pakistan is all set to open the country’s first educational and vocational training institute for its transgender community. The one-of-its-kind school, ‘The Gender Guardian’, was inaugurated on Sunday in Lahore by the NGO Exploring Future Foundation (EFF), which has attempted its first project, Dawn News reported.
“We will be providing skill-based training and curriculum to the transgender community that has enrolled with us,” said Moizzah Tariq, EFF Managing Director.
“Most of them have shown interest in sectors of the fashion industry including learning about cosmetics, fashion designing, embroidery, and stitching while some have also shown interest in graphic designing and culinary skills. Having gained information from them first we designed our courses for them,” added Tariq.
Asif Shahzad, the owner of the school, said there are 30 people currently enrolled in the school.
“I was moved after seeing the bomb blast in Indonesia in 2016 at a transgender school. It was the only such school in any Islamic country in the world. After that we decided to provide them education and bring them to the mainstream,” he said.
The plan is to provide a diploma course so that the students will be able to either work or set up their own businesses, and the NGO will facilitate them with both procedures.
There is no age limit for those who want to get enrolled in the school.
Recently, Marvia Malik made headlines when she debuted last month on a private television channel in Pakistan, becoming the country’s first transgender news anchor. Malik said she was disowned by her family when she was 16. Later, she trained and found work as a make-up artist to fund her journalism degree at Punjab University. She appears regularly on the Kohenoor News channel in Lahore.
Pakistan’s total population of transgender people reported in the sixth Population and Housing Census in 2017 was 10,418, according to a report by Dawn news.
Punjab province has 64.4 percent of the country’s transgender population with 6,709 people registered in the category.
