User:Oceanflynn/sandbox/Humaira Bachal

Humaira Bachal is an education advocate who began her own school in Moach Goth, Karachi, Pakistan when she was thirteen years old. Her work was recognized in documentaries made in 2012 and 2014 by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, a Pakistani Academy Award winning filmmaker and featured in the Gucci Chime for Change campaigns.

Early life
Humaira Bachal's mother, Zainab a Baloch, and father Bachal, a Sindhi, each had four children from previous marriages. After they were married they moved from Lyari to Thatta in Sindh where Bachal worked as a truck-driver and Zainab worked as a seamstress. They built a hut on land they owned and Humaira was born their, their firstborn as a couple. Bachal's mother was not educated but her family in Iran were, so she sent her daughters to school. Humaira Bachal started nursery school when she was three. It was the first time a girl in the family had started a formal education. Zainab's youngest son, Shakeel, Humaira Bachal's step-brother brought the girls to school. "For three years, Bachal's mother dissembled when asked direct questions about where her daughter was all day. And for three years, while Bachal attended middle school in another part of Karachi, her father had no idea what his daughter was doing. He discovered the ruse just before Bachal was going to sit for the ninth-grade entrance examination." She passed her exam, and her father later regretted having not supported her education.

Dream Model Street School
When Bachal was eleven, she began to teach young girls in her neighbourhood "in the slums of Karachi, Pakistan, where education for girls is a taboo and the literacy rate among girls is only 15 percent." Bachal's family had moved to Moach Goth c. 1995 when it was considered to be a "squatter’s colony." By 2013, Moach Goth, had grown into a settlement of over 150,000. "Humaria Bachal initially recruited students in her Karachi neighborhood for a small private school she had opened. By 2013 she was running the Dream Model Street School with 22 teachers and 1,200 students." By the time she was thirteen, she had started her own school, the Dream Model Street School. Twelve years later she and those she had mentored, had taught over a thousand girls. In 2013 Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy produced a video entitled Humaira: The Dream Catcher for the Chime for Change campaign film series featuring "inspirational women's stories" launched in 2013 by Beyoncé, Salma Hayek, and Frida Giannini that aims to spread female empowerment. In 2014 twenty-six-year old Bachal was featured in a second Chime for Change film my Obaid-Chinov called Humaira: The Game Changer  Humaira: The Dream Catcher was featured at the February 28, 2013 launch of Chime for Change which also introduced their video series A second film entitled Humaira: The Game Changer also directed by Obaid-Chinoy, was introduced at the Women’s Forum in Deauville, France on October 16, 2014 by Hayek and Chime for Change managing editor, Mariane Pearl. The first film was highlighted at The Sound of Change live during which Madonna, Chime for Change Advisory Board member, announced a "major matching contribution to build Bachal’s Dream School." She was featured in The Economist on International Women's Day, 2013 for her achievements.