[Al Ahram] The families of more than 3 million poor children in Pakistain will receive cash stipends if their children go to school, the government said as officials prepared to mark "Malala Day" on Saturday in support of a schoolgirl shot by the Taliban.UN officials declared Malala Day one month after 15-year-old Malala Yousufzai and two of her classmates were shot by the Pakistain Taliban. She had been targeted for speaking out against the insurgency.
In the days following the shooting, Yousufzai became an international icon and world leaders pledged to support her campaign for girls' education. She is now recovering in a British hospital.
On Friday, Pak president Asif Ali Zardari added his signature to petitions signed by more than a million people urging Pakistain to pay stipends to families who put their girls in school in honour of Malala.
"Malala's dreams represent what is best about Pakistain," said former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown
... the hapless former British PM ...
as he presented the petitions to President Zardari.
Tens of thousands of Britons have called on the government to nominate Malala Yousufzai for a Nobel Peace Prize for her work promoting girls' education.
On Friday, the government announced that poor families will now receive $2 a month per child in primary school.
The programme will be funded by the World Bank and Britannia and distributed through the government's Benazir Income Support Programme, designed to give small cash payments to needy families. The families in the programme already receive $10 a month for basic expenditure.
After a stipend programme was put in place in Pakistain's Punjab province, a World Bank study found a nine per cent increase in girls' enrolment over two years, said Alaphia Zoyab, the South Asia campaigner for internet activist group Avaaz.