Zainabiya Child Sponsorship Scheme - Insight

Zainabiya – A Symbol of our Community

At one time, our Community in Gujarat viewed education with reservation. They had a good reason for it. They suffered discrimination. Most qualified members of the Community were rickshaw drivers or bus conductors. In this situation, high aspirations of professional qualifications did not make sense to them. Many were content to equip their children with reading, writing and arithmetic up to Standard five. For them. Education was money related and not vocation based. At the other end, a Community wholly immersed in overwhelming poverty could not afford to provide even basic schooling for the children. In Alinakipallam – South India – a 14 year old boy, bright and smart, had no formal education and had mastered enough skill to assist a mason. This boy was not prepared to study as he could bring in Indian Rupees 450 to help his family. Even when we agreed to bear the loss of income to his family, the boy did not trust foreigners.

The above portrays the attitude then towards education. Today, with your support and co-operation, the World Federation provides basic education through Zainabiya Child Sponsorship Scheme (ZCSS) to over 9000 children in India, Bangladesh and Thailand. They get educated from nursery school to secondary school and in some cases right through to University. At present, 190 students are studying in University and several have qualified as Doctors, Engineers, Lawyers, Architects and Teachers. The Sadat children are being supported from sehme sadat portion of khums collected by the World Federation. The non Sadat children are being supported by private individuals on one to one basis.

The philosophy of ZCSS is, firstly to free the impoverished parents from the burden of educating a child, thus encouraging them to send the child to school. Transportation, food and uniform cost are subsidised. The cost in todays term is 50 cents per child per day in India. With this cost to a sponsor parent, a child in India received education. She grows up educated. When enough children from a Community become educated, this Community learns how to be self sufficient. When a Community tries to be self sufficient, it is a dignified Community, confident to remove the shackles of poverty from within it. This is how education helps to eradicate poverty from the Community.

Our Community children must be assisted to use images, sound, words and behaviour to enable them to interchange their experiences with each other. In this way, a child is able to make larger and larger of her otherwise private experiences available to others, though they may be separated from her birth or distance. Otherwise, she lies in a closed world, dead in time, closed in space : a world without distances, perspectives, alternatives and prosperity.

The World Federation believes that there is no poverty worse than that of being excluded by ignorance or by insensitivity, from the meaningful symbols of Islam.

One such symbol is Zainabiya.

An educated Community, which is the aim of Zainabiya, will create enough common symbols around which the members will communicate and co-operate with each other to achieve meaning, form and value so that the Community is raised to its higher potential. Ultimately, the function of education is to provide man with a living : not for the purpose of enlarging his capacities to consume but liberate his capacity to create a society in which humanity is able to transcend towards good and refrain from evil.

Sibtain Panjwani.
Secretary General