Teacher doesn’t take wedding day chuti in Sindh
Sheeraz Rasool Khaskheli, a teacher in Chambar, Tando Allahyar, went to school on his wedding day to collect exam papers from his students. He wore his wedding dress and took the papers before heading home for his wedding. A photo and video of him taking papers has become popular on social media.
Sheeraz Rasool said it was important to take the exam papers even on his wedding day, showing his dedication to his job as a teacher.
Umair Saleemi, journalist for BBC Urdu, shed light on Canada’s ‘Startup Visa Program’ in his latest piece:
Every year, thousands of people from India and Pakistan migrate to America, Canada and European countries for better opportunities and a brighter future.
Therefore, any changes in immigration and work visa laws or the introduction of any new programs are closely monitored in these countries.
As Canada has changed the work permit law this month, Canadian authorities extended work permits for 18 months due to increased demand in the labour market during the Covid era, which is being phased out from January next year.
Since then, Canada has initiated a startup visa program has been hailed by some experts as a golden opportunity.
The program is mainly for talented foreigners who want to establish their own small businesses or startups in Canada.
Certain criteria have been set to assess the quality of a startup, including innovation, creation of new jobs for local people and ability to compete globally.
Who can apply for a Canadian Startup Visa?
To apply for a Canadian start-up visa, a candidate must have a valid business. It is important that the candidate owns the shares of the business. One must hold 10 per cent or more of the company’s shares and have voting power (at shareholders’ meetings).
A maximum of five people can apply in this program. It is important that the startup is supported by a Canadian organisation or ‘designated body’ and a letter of support is issued.
Your business must operate from Canada, have its main activities from Canada and be established in Canada.
In addition to mastering the English language, knowledge of French can further help your startup succeed in Canada. Canadian visa rules require the applicants to be fluent in speaking, writing and understanding either English or French.
The startup visa candidate also has to provide evidence to the Canadian government that they have the resources to support themselves and their dependents. Candidates cannot manage this money by borrowing money.
Immigration expert Julie Desai told BBC Gujarati that a startup visa is quite different from a normal work permit visa. Its aim is only to attract businessmen and entrepreneurs to Canada.
The most important requirement is that the candidate’s business must be innovative enough to create new jobs in Canada, Desai explains. This visa is not for general business people — such start-up plans are needed that they can compete in the world.
Under this program, the financial resources required by a family can be determined by the number of its members. If only one person wants to go to Canada under this program, one will need 13757 Canadian dollars. This amount can increase if other family members also want to go along. It will also be important to see if the Canadian authorities revise this amount every year.
Meanwhile the candidate needs a ‘Letter of Support’ for start-up from a recognized business group in Canada. For this the candidate approaches these organisations and assures them that their startup idea deserves support.
Candidate has to contract with these institutions for a letter of support as this letter is proof that a Canadian investor, such as a venture capital fund, angel investor group or business incubator, supports the candidate’s idea.
In addition, accredited organisations also issue Canadian Government ‘Certificates of Commitment’ to candidates. The government then verifies both the letters for the visa application.
The Canadian government may ask for more information about your startup to review the information.
The Canadian government may reject the application if the letter of support or other requirements are not met.
Immigration lawyer Prashant Ajmera asserts that it is very important that the startup plan has the support of Canadian organisations, that the candidate has a detailed business plan, and to have knowledge of the Canadian market.
Zainab*, 25, has been working as a domestic servant for as long as she can remember. Her father died when she was young and her mother remarried, leaving Zainab and her sister at the mercy of extended family. Every month, she would send her salary back home for safekeeping but when she would ask for it back, it would always be less than what she had handed over. Once she even bought a buffalo with her savings, thinking it would be a safe way to invest her income, but she ended up losing money when she sold the animal. When her current employer suggested she open a bank account to keep her earnings safe, Zainab was intrigued. After jumping through many bureaucratic hoops, she finally managed to open her account. Using her savings, she has built a small house for herself and her sister.
Unfortunately, Zainab’s story is a unique one in Pakistan. As per the latest Karandaaz Financial Inclusion Survey, only 13 per cent of women in Pakistan have an account with a traditional bank or a mobile money company. In comparison, 47 per cent of men are financially included.
To open an account with a traditional bank, you have to provide documentation that proves you have a source of income. If you are financially dependent on someone else, then you must provide their documentation instead. This requirement exists regardless of gender but in a country where 75 per cent of women are out of the workforce, we can infer that it puts women at a disadvantage and makes banking less accessible for them.
Contrastingly, mobile money banking is much more accessible. If you have a mobile phone and an ID card, you can easily open your account. But women’s mobile ownership is also low. In its survey, Karandaaz found that only 38 per cent of women own a mobile phone, compared to 83 per cent of men. In the same survey, they found that 43 per cent of women without access to a phone said that they do not have permission from their spouse or family to own or use one.
Sabahat Bokhari is the head of diversity and inclusion at Jazz, one of Pakistan’s largest mobile network providers. Jazz also owns JazzCash, which is a leading mobile money banking service in Pakistan and counts women as 29 per cent of its users.
Bokhari cites the matter of permissions as a major roadblock to meeting their internal inclusion targets. “‘We don’t allow women to have their own sims, we don’t allow women to have phones’ is what we hear on our visits to rural areas,” she said.
This suggests that the reason for the gender gap in financial and digital inclusion is not just accessibility, but also the deeply unequal power dynamics inside Pakistani homes.
“One thing that we miss from these conversations — be it digital inclusion, be it financial inclusion, or just generally any kind of gendered inclusion in public spaces — is the fact that Pakistan is a supremely patriarchal country, where most of the women in the country depend on men in the household to ‘allow’ them to have access,” Hija Kamran, a digital rights advocate, said.
Kamran argues that most women in Pakistan are actually eager to be a part of the digital and financial ecosystems. However, they are not allowed to do so by the men in their households. So when someone from, for example Jazz, visits and offers them a SIM card, they have to refuse for the sake of their own safety.
This issue of male permissions is pervasive. Non-profits that are working to close the gender gap in financial and digital inclusion confirm that they also face these challenges.
Circle is a non-profit organisation that has trained more than 7000 low-income Pakistani women in digital and financial literacy this year. During these trainings, women learn how to monetise their existing skills, how to start businesses through social media and how to use digital banking.
Currently, 1500 of their trainees’ businesses are active but many other trainees lack the motivation to start or continue businesses. Laiba Saleem, a community building coordinator at Circle, says this is often a result of family restrictions, including men of the house “not allowing” women to work or be online.
“One woman who was enrolled in our training didn’t come the next day because her father beat her and interrogated her about why she was trying to learn how to use a phone,” Saleem said. “Another one had set up her business as a henna artist on Instagram but as soon as her brother found out, he forced her to take down her account.”
The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2023 ranked Pakistan as 142nd out of 146 countries in terms of gender parity, with economic participation getting a particularly low score. Despite governments, corporations and non-profits making efforts to include women financially and digitally, gendered power dynamics in Pakistan appear stubborn and slow to change.
Fiza Farhan is a global development advisor and serves on the United Nations’ high level panel on women’s economic empowerment. In 2018, she worked with the Australian High Commission in Pakistan to launch “Male Champions of Change,” a coalition of male CEOs working on gender parity in their companies.
“Since decades, its always been women working on women empowerment issues in rooms full of women — whereas 98 per cent of your leadership is men,” she said. “Without involving the male leaders, who have made the system, how are you even trying to change the system?”
Farhan argues that by bringing influential men on board, including community leaders and mosque imams, significant progress can be made. These influential people will be able to make the business case for women’s inclusion to ordinary men.
Hija Kamran agrees that involving community leaders has been an effective strategy for reshaping societal beliefs.
“That has been sort of efficient, in the sense that men have listened to it,” she said. “Because somebody who they trust is talking to them rather than someone who is outside the community and is coming in and telling them how to deal with their own issues.”
However, she is vocal about the limitations of such interventions. Men may understand the economic benefits to the household of “allowing” women to work, but that doesn’t mean they will permit women to have other freedoms, like opening a bank account or buying a phone.
“Who is being helped at the end of the day? When women go into the labour force, they are doing the labour, they are putting in the work but who’s getting the fruit,” Kamran asked. “What will happen is that at the end of the month, when the salary comes in, somebody else will be enjoying the independence that comes with women’s labour.”
Zainab’s story is a practical example of these concerns. She worked hard for her salary but it wasn’t only hers at the end of the month — until she opened a bank account. When she used her savings to build a small house for herself, she was mocked for wasting money. Her relatives questioned why she wasn’t saving it for her dowry instead. What was the point of building your own house when you will inevitably get married off and have to move in to your husband’s house, they asked.
But perhaps the house she built, and the fragile protection it provides to her from patriarchy, is the only reason Zainab has some semblance of independence, unlike most women in Pakistan.
*Name has been changed to protect identity.
British government statistics from 2017 to 2019 reveal that British youth of Pakistani origin are dropping out of education.
The British government collects data during the annual population survey. According to the report, among the British youth, the majority of young Pakistani origin ones are not studying.
The survey revealed that this young lot is not part of any training program, nor are they employed.
According to British government statistics, 12 per cent of Bangladeshis, 11.7 per cent of white British and 11.5 per cent of black British youth are not employed, nor attaining any education or training.
In Pakistan, 95 per cent of Pakistanis are worried about the possibility of unemployment, while only 5% are confident of job security.
Apsus Pakistan’s new survey, based on public opinion, says that there has been a clear increase in the rate of Pakistanis claiming to be unemployed in the last one year.
According to the survey, 95 per cent of Pakistanis are afraid of unemployment due to the country’s economic conditions, while only 5 percent are confident of job security.
In the survey, 63 per cent said that they, or someone they know, lost their job; and 99 per cent claimed that it was difficult to buy daily necessities, while 99 per cent were not confident about buying a house or a car.
About 96 per cent of Pakistanis expressed their inability to save and invest to meet their financial needs in the future.
Gallup Pakistan and PRIDE have conducted a combined research, revealing that up to 35 percent of female doctors in Pakistan are currently without a job.
The research is based on the Labour Force Survey of 2020-21 and has analysed Pakistan Bureau of Statistics’ data on the labour market, collected from 99,900 households.
According to the Pakistan Medical and Dental Council, Pakistan has produced about 200,000 doctors since 1947, half of them being women.
Currently, 104,974 women doctors live in Pakistan of whom 68,209 (65 per cent) are working at private and state-owned medical centres.
15,619 (14.9 per cent) are jobless, while 21,146 (20.1 per cent) are out of the labour force.
Meanwhile, more than 36,000 women doctors are either unemployed or have chosen not to work.
Additionally, as per Bureau of Emigration, since 1970, about 30,000 doctors have left Pakistan, and 1,000 on average will leave every year. Most of them obtained subsidised education from public universities.
The report further highlights that an average private medical university charges more than Rs5 million whereas the government provides the same education for less than Rs1 million. This indicates that taxpayers’ money goes in vain because one in three of the women doctors do not work.
To be precise, Rs200 billion is spent on around 50,000 women doctors that goes wasted.
The survey found that about 28 percent of medical graduates live in rural areas and 72 per cent in urban areas.
In rural regions, 52 percent Pakistan’s medical graduates are employed and 31 percent are not. Lesser people (i.e. 17 percent) in the rural areas opt to remain out of the labour force in comparison to the national average of 20 percent.
On the other hand, 70 per cent of the graduates are employed in the urban area, while less than 9 per cent are unemployed. Here, more than 21 per cent of the medical graduates choose to remain out of the labour force.
78 per cent women in the urban areas have employment opportunities while in rural areas it is as low as 22 per cent.
Nonetheless, joblessness in rural areas is higher in rural areas at 57 per cent and 43 per cent in the urban centres.
Out of the 21,146 women medical graduates who preferred to remain out of the labour force, “their share in cities stands much higher at 76.6 per cent compared to their 23.4 per cent share in rural areas”. And about 76 per cent were married.
54 per cent of the women medical graduates fall in the age bracket of 25-34 years.
Pakistan is facing serious financial troubles, and rising unemployment is just making matters worse for the country. Thousands of applicants can be seen seated on a stadium field to take a written test to be hired as constables by the Islamabad Police in a video that has recently surfaced on social media.
For the written exam, which was held on Saturday at the Sports Complex in Islamabad, at least 32,000 applicants were forced to sit outside in the cold.
For the 1,667 openings for police constables that were announced, more than 30,000 male and female applicants from all over Pakistan, according to Islamabad police, took the written test.
The positions of police constables have been unfilled for the past five years.
A new debate on how to increase employment in the nation has been ignited by the massive turnout at the Islamabad Police recruitment. Pakistan’s unemployment rate has peaked. The number of unemployed people is also steadily rising because there is so little hiring for government positions. Despite this, thousands of applicants are vying for open positions in the public sector.
Over 31 per cent of the country’s youth are unemployed, according to a report published by the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE) in 2022. There are 51 per cent girls and 16 per cent of boys among them, and many of them have professional degrees.
Pakistan has approximately 60 per cent of its population under the age of 30, and its unemployment rate is currently 6.9 per cent.
With plans to layoff thousands of employees this week, Facebook parent company Meta will join a growing list of digital companies that are reducing their workforces.
As of September 30, Meta has over 87,000 people working for it across its various platforms, which include the social media sites Facebook and Instagram as well as the messaging service WhatsApp. According to WSJ, the social media business had reduced its ambitions to hire engineers by at least 30 per cent in June, and Mark Zuckerberg had advised staff to prepare for a slowdown in the economy.
In his announcement of Meta’s dismal third-quarter results, CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated that the company’s headcount will not rise by the end of 2023 and might even decline significantly.
“In 2023, we’re going to focus our investments on a small number of high-priority growth areas. So that means some teams will grow meaningfully, but most other teams will stay flat or shrink over the next year. In aggregate, we expect to end 2023 as either roughly the same size or even a slightly smaller organization than we are today,” Zuckerberg said on the last earnings call in late October.
Profits for Meta dropped to $4.4 billion in the third quarter, a 52 percent year-over-year decline. The poor findings had a significant negative impact on Meta’s stock price, which dropped by 25 per cent in one day.
Over the past year, the company’s market value has decreased to $600 billion.
In a previous open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s shareholder Altimeter Capital Management stated that the company needed to streamline by eliminating positions and capital expenditures. They also stated that investors had lost faith in Meta as a result of its increased spending and pivot to the metaverse.
Owing to increased interest rates, rising inflation, and a European energy crisis, several technological businesses, including Microsoft Corp., Twitter Inc., and Snap Inc., have reduced workforce in recent months.
Many Pakistanis prefer working for the government over the private sector since a government job not only offers job stability but also other incentives that encourage people to work for the government.
People from middle-class households typically favour working in the government. We have addressed the benefits that favour government jobs for career advancement because there are some benefits that the private sector does not provide.
Here are some advantages of government jobs:
Working hours
The benefit of choosing government employment over the private sector is the flexible work schedule. In contrast to positions in the private sector, when employees are occasionally required to work a little bit extra, occupations in the public sector have set working hours. However, in some government agencies, working overtime is required without compensation.
Job security
The biggest benefit of working for the government is job stability. And there is no job security in the private sector. In contrast, there is very little chance that any government official will lose his or her job.
Employees in the private sector are displaced like houseflies because this perk is only available to those working in government sectors.
Promotions
Another crucial element in the public sector is the promotional benefit. Promotion in government positions is always contingent on how well and how long you work. However, this can occasionally be both a benefit and a drawback because someone who is above average may not be able to develop as quickly as his typical counterparts.
Benefits and perks
Next in the government sector are the perks and rewards. As a result, the government sector offers a wide range of benefits, including pension plans, retirement benefits, health care, housing loans, and childcare, among others. However, several significant private sector enterprises do provide such advantages.
In the government sector, however, retirement becomes crucial since it guarantees the longevity of a person’s career.
Read more: Here’s how to use a SIM in a non-PTA approved phone
Lesser stress
The government sector, as we’ve seen above, has set working hours. Therefore, these hours will result in reduced work-related stress. The best time frame to finish the work on time and in the best way is offered by government jobs, which is not available in the private sector.
Respect
Along with all these advantages, working for the government increases respect. Everyone will treat you with respect if you work for the government because of your authority and position.
Salary increments
The other best perk of working for the government is, of course, wage increases. As a result, your compensation will rise without regard to how well you perform. So this is fantastic if you are an average performer.
These multiple advantages provided by government employment may provide you a competitive advantage over the private sector. A government career is the ideal option, though, if you are considering doing something exceptional in the future and need job fulfilment.
Where to apply?
There are currently hundreds of job vacancies on the websites below:
These websites allow interested applicants to submit applications for several Pakistani government job positions. Numerous openings, from entry-level to senior-level ones, are listed on these websites.
Applying for posts in the following categories is possible: BPS-01, BPS-04, BPS-05, BPS-09, BPS-11, BPS-14, BPS-15, EVP/SEVP, G-1, G-2, G-3, G-4, Grade-10, Grade-11, Grade-12, MP-I, MS-VIII, PPS-10 and PPS-12.
People who live in Punjab can apply for the most recent positions that the Punjab Government has posted, including those in the departments of planning and development, energy, and health care, by visiting Punjab Jobs Online.
According to a new study, female candidates who wear hijab (head scarf) received significantly less positive feedback from employers in the Netherlands and Germany. The discrimination against hijab-wearing Muslim women was highlighted in an academic article published by the European Sociological Review Journal.
Discrimination was generally seen in jobs that required engaging with clients and consumers in person.
Researchers discovered that in comparison to the Netherlands and Germany, Spain had less discrimination against veiled women.
In the Netherlands, approximately 70 per cent of job applications that included a photograph of an unveiled woman received positive feedback for jobs that required high customer contact. But only 35 per cent of applicants who were wearing hijab in their photographs received positive feedback.
“The high level of discrimination we found in the Netherlands, where the institutional context has traditionally been open to the accommodation of religious minority rights, is particularly surprising and points to the possibly stigmatising effect of recent policies geared towards the cultural assimilation of immigrants,” the research said.
The results of the field experiment in Germany were similar. While 53 per cent of non-hijab-wearing Muslim women received a positive response from employers, only about 25 per cent of veiled women received positive feedback.