Child Development and Youth Leadership Program
Insan FoundationInsan began its work in 1992 with the mission to provide basic literacy skills to the child workers and street children in Lahore, the second
most populated city of Pakistan. “Insan” is an Urdu word that stands
for “human” and serves as the basic principle for the organization to work
for and with all humans irrespective of any identity. Insan faced one of theglaring realities in the factory area of Lahore at that time—the considerable
population of children working in automobile workshops, small hotels andshops whose exploitation put at stake their own future in particular, andtheir humanity in general. Thus, Insan wanted to do something for them aswell as for humanity.
The volunteers of Insan, who started off its first ever Child Education
Program in 1992, hailed from urban universities and colleges. Those youth
were under the impression at the outset that poverty was the fundamental
reason of children’s being at the workplaces or streets than schools. They
believed so because they themselves were from the privileged class and werethus unaware about the political side of poverty. So, their first impression
while approaching the deprived children was driven by “mercy” rather than“critical consciousness.” However, their naive perception vanished very soon
when majority of the children revealed that they had attended schools atleast once in their lives but dropped out because of corporal punishment
by the teachers and the threatening and dull environment existing at their74

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schools. Therefore, the harsh reality coming from the children themselves
helped Insan come to the conclusion that it needed to make its educational
program “attractive”, “meaningful” and “relevant” and it should involve parents and communities in the process. This was how games, theater, exposure
trips and community festivals and meetings became part of the ‘informal
educational system’ and children found themselves to be at home and wellconnected to the organization.
Insan in Brief
Insan Foundation Trust (ift) is a non-profit and pluralist organization,
working to protect, support and promote the human rights of the most marginalized sections of society, especially children, women’s empowerment,
negotiated peace, good governance and sustainable development. It operates in Pakistan with the following objectives:• To mobilize, educate and train youth groups, communities andgovernment and non-government institutions to ensure healthy
development of deprived children• To demonstrate social, political and economic viability of genderequality and women’s empowerment with the involvement of women, communities, government and non-government structures andinstitutions• To enable stakeholders to protect, support and promote sustainable development and negotiated peace as a social value and belief.
Insan Foundation was registered in 2002 under the Trust Act 1882. Itchanged its formal name in 2008 into the Insan Foundation Trust, in compliance with the rules of the Trust Act.
Aside from the members of its Board, there are twenty-one full-time
staff members and about three hundred forty volunteers working with Insan.
Since 2009, Insan has been running two fundamental programs, i.e., Gender
Equality and Women’s Empowerment Program and Child Development andLeadership Program, through Capacity Development, Research, Advocacy
and Technical Assistance.
Insan implemented its first program for eight years. It established educational centers that were mostly located in factory area and urban slums of
Lahore. These centers are working in urban and semi urban and rural areas.
During its first eight years, Insan catered to about a hundred students per

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six months in each of the six educational centers. At one point of time, Insan
also launched one such center in a village called “Theatre” near the PakistanIndia border.
The technique of education coined by Insan was very innovative butvery simple. Insan used newspapers for enabling children to identify alphabets, connect them to make words and words into sentences in two to threemonths time. Very soon, children got used to being able to identify basicsocial, political and economic issues of their communities also. Then theorganization engaged them in reporting incidents of child rights and humanrights violations taking place in their communities. Selective reports were
published in the newsletters. Sometimes children also draw and gain spacein the newsletter’s art-corner. This was how Insan moved with its Child
Education Program in which “critical consciousness” remained at the center
stage. It was through this process that children came to know how badly society was treating children as well as women. They started asking questions
as to why men killed women.
In eight years of work, many of the students became volunteers andstarted helping Insan undertake theater shows, even in the streets and bazaars, in Lahore and elsewhere to educate people about the negative impact
of child labor and poor educational system on children. “Mistree Natik” or“Mechanics Theatre”, which was named after the first batch of child workers
who were mostly automobile mechanics, also started performing in every
nook and corner of the province. And it was noted on the way that their relationship with their child-apprentices was very different from the one which
they faced as children themselves.
The street plays, as they progressed, improved on their themes. During
years of work, Insan’s opinion about the problem of child labor started shaping in a holistic manner. Insan started feeling that child labor existed becauseof poor educational system which was the product of poverty of resources
as well as thought. The poverty of thought refers to development priorities
and the political will of the policy makers. The organization realized that theissue of child labor could not be addressed unless development priorities ofPakistan were aligned to the cognitive needs of children; Pakistan increased
spending on children rather than on bombs and guns; and the state tookcare of girl children and women. Some years down the road, Mistree Natikand the educational centers developed a consensus about peace, girl’s rights
education and women’s rights as priorities of its advocacy initiatives alongwith basic literacy and child rights education.

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Synthesis: From Delivery to Capacity Development
As Insan moved to the end of 2000 its work had synthesized and the organization felt that it was being pushed to explore new venues. The organization
was under great pressure from new communities and old and new students
to further ramify and this stress prompted it to realize that it could not manage to go with the same speed and in the same direction due to the scarcity
of financial resources. The organization analyzed that there was a need formore local groups and organizations to join the struggle and moving one
step ahead—from service delivery to advocacy and training—was a must.
It felt it was in a position to share its experience and transfer the corporate
knowledge gained in all those years. It concluded that providing “equality”
education to all children was the prime responsibility of the state according
to the national and international commitments and that unless peace, human rights education and women’s rights became first priority of the state ofPakistan, there was hardly any constructive change expected. This realization then guided Insan in launching a national-level capacity development,
peace advocacy program and women’s rights education program with small
like-minded groups, organizations and institutions across Pakistan.
The training program, called Child Labor Advocacy and Training
Program, was logically an offshoot of the Child Education Program. It
helped partner groups and organizations design and undertake similar
forms of programs according to their own local realities. Through this program, Insan moved from stage 1 to stage 2, from delivery of the services totraining and motivating many more groups and organizations on “how to
institutionalize, mobilize and deliver.” The organization developed a rangeof training manuals, educational games and organizational development
tools and checklists, etc. The training workshops and exposures included
comprehensive introduction to the social, political, economic and legal sideof the issue of child labor, child rights, role of the government and the state,human and financial resource mobilization, program design and proposal
writing, program monitoring, reporting and evaluation, etc.
In four years of the training program since 2000, Insan trained forty
organizations and helped them design long-term child development andleadership programs. As follow up in the capacity development program,the forty organizations made child labor education and peace activism as
part of their organizational missions and programs.

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By disseminating information and motivation material, Insan expanded
membership in its peace campaign, Dove Day, to interested segments of society, mostly youth and their parents.
Insan launched this peace campaign in 2002 in the context of war hysteria and armed conflicts in the regional context. The members of this campaign used to gather at Lahore and Islamabad at one point every month andfly dove cutouts to voice out peace and demand symbolically from the state
to opt for peaceful negotiations to solve the conflicts.
Women’s rights education remained at a low profile, mostly as assertions and punctuations, in the debate of rights and peace until 2007 when
Insan developed a game on giving orientation to common citizens andrights activists about women’s rights. Insan contacted women rights activists, trainers and researchers to add content to the game, especially fromthe Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against
Women (cedaw) and the Constitution of Pakistan. In the beginning of
2008, Insan had its comprehensive strategic review that resulted not onlyin structural change in the organization but also women’s rights and gendercame to the forefront. This was also important because of the increasing
violence against women on the one hand and the policy discussions andlegislative processes going on at the national level.
Child Development and Youth Leadership Program:
Graduating Through the Years
But going back to the beginning of 2002 is important for Insan from anotherangle, when it also decided to diversify and involve educational institutionsin its peace and rights education activism.
The need to involve schools was in recognition of the fact that they
were natural allies and best positioned to effectively change the attitudesof the youth and communities toward children, working children, peace,and human rights, due to their specific role in society. This could also help
Insan to “institutionalize” the struggle and thus make the efforts sustainable in financial and programmatic sense. This idea got further polishedwhen Insan decided to make sports activities the entry point for developing
partnership with schools and inculcating concepts like child rights, education, joyful learning and peace (in the regional context with India as a primary concern). It was thus the beginning of Child Development and YouthChild Development and Youth Leadership Program

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Leadership Program in which sports, awareness, mobilization and activism
became interconnected and made Insan the first organization in Pakistan
which employed sports for social change.
Insan’s “sports for change” started in the North Western Frontier
Province (nwfp). At that time, nwfp had considerably attained national attention due to low literacy, lesser opportunities for sports and play available
to the children and rising militancy especially in the context of 9/11 and thesubsequent war on terror. Initially there was a resistance in communities
towards sports, but volunteers did not give up unless parents themselves
became part of the process. On the basis of this experience, Insan took its
sports project to Quetta, Balochistan province, to mitigate the sufferings ofthe earthquake-hit population. Insan worked there for about two years till
the communities, especially children were out of the trauma caused by themassive destruction and human casualties.
Insan designed its project for thirty educational institutions at Peshawar
at the beginning in 2002. The schools were local and those of Afghan refugee communities. About 18,000 male and female students were involvedin sports and orientation sessions on various issues, including child rights,
peace, health and hygiene, etc. Volunteer coaches took different sessions,for example, on health and hygiene, hepatitis A, B and C, etc. Insan in fact
trained a number of head-coaches for delivery of sports and health education sessions to volunteer coaches. The volunteer coaches delivered minilectures on selected issues and mentored male and female students’ sports
activities. During their play sessions, the students also learned how to respect their bodies and those of others, how to behave, how to treat minors
and elders, how to take care of their sports facilities, etc. It is also important
to note that special children were involved and made part of the mainstream
sports and educational sessions too.
Before Insan partnered with schools, Afghan and local communities
were against sports and used to discourage children from playing. Sports forgirls were simply out of question due to the cultural barriers. But the mobilization by Insan’s team and volunteers led to a level where even girls started
playing with boys and schools continue to do the same practices even after
one year of the formal closing of the project. And even some of the communities ask why Insan did not do the same program for them too.
When Insan was closing its funded work in nwfp in December 2008,
there were eighteen schools formally working under the Child Development

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and Youth Leadership Program. Due to the mobilization and close working
relationship, there are at present twelve educational institutions (covering
about 14,000 students) and one hundred fifty volunteers still working with
Insan. On the basis of quality results, Insan is also planning to implement thesame program in South Punjab province. Religious extremism and intolerance are rising as fallout of the military operation in nwfp and Balochistan
and therefore conditions demand from Insan to continue to play its role asa member of civil society. Insan believes that sports are best means to weanchildren away from the culture of violence and extremism. Insan is currently in the process of identifying financial resources for a long-term project
which should enable it to work in at least eighty formal schools and withestimated 40,000 male and female students, in rural and semi-urban areas.
Year 2007 was also important in the life of Insan. In this year, Insan
wanted to groom Mistree Natak on professional grounds. Until then,Mistree Natak was purely a volunteer work, which gained immense support. In 2007, Insan hired a creative director to take care of Natak independently, developed a full-fledge office for it, bought equipment and thenecessary gadgets, and earmarked budget so that volunteers were paid fortheir performances. Some new volunteers also joined. The idea was to enable Natak to run independently and start performing on request of otherorganizations that were willing to engage the group in helping them in raising awareness of various issues. That was where Insan miscalculated. Whenmoney came in, actors started pushing each other to get selected for theroles. Money became the focus of interest, especially of the new volunteers
who were not on the same wavelength and did not carry the heritage. That
was a time when the Natak team started developing differences and the differences took the form of irrevocable split. Before Insan’s leadership could
jump in to help the team resolve the issues, many volunteers had alreadyleft. Once the group was in disarray, Insan could not muster up the courage
to design anything of the sort again.
Reflections: Institutional Development of Insan
While Insan was sad upon the demise of its cherished Mistree Natak, it still
had to move on. It was time for a serious review of the past and to planfor future challenges. And the organization exerted its energies to keep the
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fact played a very central role in sustenance of the volunteer spirit. Though
Insan is also currently running a women equality and gender mainstreaming program, and its researches and technical support to the governmentand civil society are now widely acknowledged, the Child Development andYouth Leadership Program is in fact the one that has given new horizons
to Insan to explore. It provided the basis on which Insan is standing today.
The Child Development and Youth Leadership Program, through years
of its existence in one form or the other, enabled Insan to recruit hundredsof volunteers. It was not possible to run the program at such a massive scale
without voluntary support of teachers, coaches, communities and parents.
It was not possible to shape the opinion of the children, youth and communities without the program. It has helped Insan in bringing about aconstructive social change on the one hand and enhancing the role of theorganization from delivery of services to technical support, capacity development and research on the other hand. It enabled the organization towork with many partner organizations across Pakistan and even India andCanada. Even today, it remains to be a common point of reference between
Insan and the donors’ community. On the basis of this program, Insan developed many educational materials, such as rights-orientation card games(on children and then women in later stages), story analysis exercises, street
theater skits, training manuals, which it used for awareness and education.
Insan developed different card games on Child Rights, Gender, and Human
Rights. The card games involve a set of cards that contain different violations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention on the
Rights of the Child, and cedaw. Another set of cards contains the articles of
the human rights instruments. This game is played in teams. There is a score
sheet. Team A shows the cards of violations; Team B has to find the particular articles related to the violations. This card game is available in Urdu andDari languages (for Afghans). See Annex A for the list of materials of Insan.
Today, Insan has support of project partners in all the four provinces ofPakistan. Insan is already known well in the social development circles. The
Canadian International Development Agency (cida), International Labor
Organization (ilo), ActionAid, Norwegian Human Rights Fund (nhrf),
Right to Play (rtp), etc. have worked with Insan on these projects. In thissense, Insan is present in communities and has the support of volunteer
groups, civil society organizations and donors. Insan is also working with

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H u m a n R i g h t s E d u c at i o n i n A s i a - Pa c i f i cgovernments. Currently, Insan is engaged with the Afghan government,
through Governor Jalalabad, on the “Sports for Change” program (the component of the program being run in Afghan refugee schools in nwfp).

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Annex A
Insan Materials

Insan developed different card games on child rights, gender,and human rights.
One set of cards contains different violations of UDHR, CRC
and CEDAW. While another set of cards contains the articles of theconventions. This game is played in teams. There is a score sheet.
Team A shows the cards of violations, Team B finds the particular
article related to the violation.
This card game is available in Urdu and Dari (for Afghans)
languages.
Footsteps: Survival to Development Dynamics
National Research on Practical and Strategic Needs of Afghan
Refugee Children
Health Manual
A Guide for Teachers on Health and Hygiene. It contains
information about thirty-five common diseases along with playtechniques as to how teachers can give health information throughgames.
This manual is in Dari language, developed for Afghan
Refugees.
Environmental Scanning: Gender Sensitivity in Government
Employment Sector-Punjab
This is the report on a survey of twenty-three districts and
six Punjab provincial line departments including those responsible
for health, local government & community development, services& general administration, education and, planning & development
matters.
Peace and Smile: Sports Tournaments for Afghan Refugee
and Pakistani children
Thematic Sports Tournaments for which children prepare
different programs and speeches as well
Mouse Pad
Millennium Development Goals
WE CAN, WE MUST!
Sports for Social Change – Some Experiences
Success stories of social change through sports