Celebrating Ramadan around the world: Pakistan
18 September 2008
“The month of Ramadan emphasises the virtues of generosity, sacrifice and sympathy”
DFID Minister Shahid Malik
To mark Ramadan, on the DFID website throughout September DFID employees and other development workers from around the world will be describing their own experiences of the holiest month in the Islamic calendar.
Pakistani Muslims Tariq Nasir and Agha Ali Jawad work for the National Rural Support Programme (NRSP), which is one of a range of rural anti-poverty initiatives to benefit from DFID help. Tariq, a milkman by trade, is a community activist focused on empowering people to raise themselves out of poverty, while Ali brings his financial expertise to bear as the programme's General Manager.
In the audio clips below, the two men talk about their own, personal experiences of Ramadan. They also explain how their faith informs their work helping Pakistan's poorest people.
- Agha Ali Jawad
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- Read the transcript
- Tariq Nasir
- Read the transcript
Find out more about the
NRSP
on its website, and watch previous DFID Ramadan diaries from Indonesia
and Nigeria.
You can also use the Google Map below to discover more about
how DFID is helping people in Pakistan.
Find out more
DFID recently announced a doubling of its aid to Pakistan, with assistance set to rise to £480 million by 2011. Although the country has made good progress towards the Millennium Development Goals, and the target of halving poverty by 2015 is achievable, there is still a lot to do.
More about Pakistan, its development challenges and what DFID is doing to help:
Children
- Around 94 in every 1,000 children die before they are 5 years of age and 38% of children are malnourished.
- In recent years DFID has helped to save the lives of 200,000 children (increasing the percentage being immunised from 53% to 76%), and stopped 800,000 from becoming malnourished.
Killer diseases
- There are 250,000 new cases of tuberculosis (TB) in Pakistan every year.
- DFID has prevented 2.4 million TB and 450,000 malaria cases, and helped polio cases drop from 5,000 to 32 a year.
- Over the next five years, DFID plans to invest up to £230 million in Pakistan's health sector, including £90 million to the National Maternal, Newborn and Child Health programme.
Disasters
- The earthquake of October 2005 killed an estimated 73,000 people and affected a further 3.5 million.
- DFID provided £53.4 million in immediate emergency relief in the aftermath and has since provided £49 million for reconstruction, helping to rebuild 250,000 houses.
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