Why Aabroo?                        

A major proportion of the rural population in Pakistan is flooding the posh areas of all major cities. These folks come looking for employment and earn cash wages to sustain their lives. In the absence of civil amenities, infrastructure, employment opportunities, health services, appropriate education, and above all non availability of sufficient cash wages, these people find it very attractive to migrate towards the urban areas and look for what they need for their living. These people bring along their rural culture, habits, their peculiar living styles, language, accents, and the usual rural lethargy. In the cities they dwell in the slums and Kachi Abadies around the posh urban areas. In this way huge rural clusters develop within the urban areas and usual rural routine is set up here. These habitations are now officially termed as Urban Slums and 1100 such urban slums now exist in Punjab. Presently 125 million people live in these slums. Lahore only has 250 such rural clusters and three million people live in them of which children are a major proportion. Once in the urban slum, both wife and husband have to work as house maids, and as daily wage earner in the local factories or in the construction industry. As a result their children are neglected. They not only remain illiterate but are mostly sick and also malnourished.  Slum children often work as domestic helpers or street vendors or beg to supplement their family incomes. Their parents abuse them by sending them to work at an early age and the corrupt members of the privileged society also misuse and sexually exploit them. These children thus grow and end up as thieves, vagabonds and prostitutes.

It is vital to focus on this growing mass of slum children to tackle the deprivations that are becoming so painfully evident in our big cities. In order to minimize this evil and attempt to finally eradicate it from the society, we feel it necessary to educate these illiterate and neglected children through contemporary and religious mode of education.

Educating slum children can help avoid their exclusion from a range of opportunities available in big cities. Yet, several factors conspire to deprive them of education. Their parents can not afford the costs associated with the nominally free government education and would have to forgo an important part of household income if children attended schools instead of working for money. Even if they are cajoled into joining formal schooling, they are often unable to cope with their studies due to the inflexible school syllabi and the lack of support at home.