It was 1947. After 300 years, the British had left India, dividing the subcontinent. More than 15 million Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs were uprooted in the Partition, resulting in one of the greatest migrations in human history.
Nasra Wazir Ali and her husband, Wazir Ali, a member of the Indian Civil Service, decided to take their three-year-old daughter Shahnaz and leave their life in New Delhi. As a Muslim family with roots in Punjab, they wanted to settle in Pakistan. They arrived in Karachi and established their home in a government-owned bungalow. Chosen as the capital of the newly formed Pakistan, Karachi became inundated with an influx of refugees who came to settle in the city.
As a new nation was born and Pakistan struggled with its identity, Nasra tried to create a sense of stability for her family amidst the chaos. Having grown up with access to an education, she was keen to find a school for her daughter. With the country in a state of flux, an economic burden fell on public services, including the educational system. There were no schools nearby, so Nasra began to teach Shahnaz at home. In Delhi, she had earned a bachelor’s degree in education and thought she would volunteer her services to help the children from the neighborhood.
The parents happily accepted her offer, so Nasra converted the family’s living room into a classroom and enlisted some of the mothers to help. Her class quickly began to grow as she welcomed any child looking to learn. In a matter of three months, all four rooms of their home had transformed into classrooms and the family moved into the garage to make room for more students.
“My earliest memories are of our home and school as one,” Shahnaz said. “My mother used to always say ‘Think about what you can do. What can you personally do to change the circumstances around you?’” The national ethos was taking shape, and there was a sense of pride among the people beginning to call Pakistan home. “When I look back at my mother’s life, creating this school was clearly her way of dealing with the circumstances, of doing something for her country.”
In 1949, Nasra, with the help of her brother, registered her home school as a not-for-profit named the Education Trust Nasra School. Around this time, the government had caught wind of what she was doing and told her she was no longer allowed to operate a school on government property. To Nasra, this minor setback was an opportunity. Since her class had already outgrown the family’s home, she could begin the search to find a proper home for Nasra School.
Nasra hit the streets, combing the oldest and densest corners of Karachi, to look for a building that would make an ideal environment for her child-centered, activities-based curriculum inspired by Friedrich Fröbel. When she started the school in the family’s home, the idea was to provide a quality primary and secondary education for children from the lower and middle classes of society. Nasra went deep into the city, where laborers and small shopkeepers lived, to find space for a school that would not only be easy for these families to access but affordable as well.
She and her husband eventually found a piece of land with nothing but a dilapidated Roman-style house surrounded by big stone barracks. It was rundown but Nasra saw potential. The family carved out a small apartment in the house and dedicated the rest of the space to build what would become the first campus for Nasra School.
As classes got underway, Nasra laid out her vision for the school driven by the belief that every child deserves a quality education: to create a low-cost school that would open its doors to both boys and girls. It would run as efficiently as possible and maximize economies of scale without sacrificing quality. “My mother was extremely far-sighted in seeing that the transformation of society would only come through education, particularly girls’ education,” Shahnaz said.
Nasra’s vision quickly became a reality as parents enrolled their children and hundreds of students flooded the classrooms. Because she was committed to making quality education affordable, families paid only 25 rupees per child, and she filled the roles of superintendent and principal, along with creating the curriculum and training the teachers, to keep overhead low. It was important to Nasra that the school could stand on its own. She grounded her vision in a self-financing model, so she wouldn’t have to constantly ask for funding and depend on philanthropy and outside donors.
Her strategy proved successful. Over the course of 67 years, Nasra Education Trust opened five custom-built campuses across Karachi to serve roughly 500,000 children. The school’s graduates have gone on to become doctors and lawyers, national cricket players and Supreme Court Justices, and teachers who have come back to carry on Nasra’s legacy.
“My mother married both reality and aspiration in such a way that she was able to actually build these institutions,” Shahnaz said. “Her contribution at the national level is quite significant for a single person with no real resources except her own intellect, experience and vision. She was a living example of a dedicated educationist in every respect.”
When her husband died in 1993, Nasra moved back onto the school’s original campus in a one-room apartment, close to the institution she built from scratch and surrounded by the children she loved. She lived there until she passed away in August of 2015 at the age of 92. During those final years, she reached out to her grandson, Amir Fancy, a successful businessman who had built companies in Pakistan, the U.S. and the Middle East, to help her find a way to expand Nasra Schools. Nasra Schools had succeeded in bringing quality education to the poor and earned an esteemed reputation throughout the country, but the campuses couldn’t keep up with demand. Karachi has become not just the biggest city in Pakistan but the third largest city in the world. And, of its roughly 23 million people, half live in poverty.
As a charitable institution, Nasra Schools had raised its tuition fees over the years to adjust with inflation, but always kept costs accessible to Karachi’s low-income families. Nasra encouraged Amir to figure out a dynamic business approach that would help serve more children while staying true to the values at the core of her vision. “I remember telling her ‘Look, I don’t come from an education background,’” Amir said. “Everyone in my family, from my mother to my sisters, has worked in education. I am the only one not qualified. She simply replied ‘Close your eyes. This is what you need to do.’”
As always, she was right. Amir has transformed his grandmother’s nonprofit into a successful for-profit company, known as Nasra Public Schools (NPS). The social enterprise, which Acumen invested in last year, operates 11 low-cost, private K-12 schools across Karachi providing more than 2,500 children with a quality education. In Pakistan, the price of education is usually parallel with the quality of education offered, causing a huge segment of the population to miss out because they are unable to afford more expensive schools.
“In Pakistan, schools are a big business,” Amir said. “The country’s approach to education is not based on social responsibility. They run these schools as hard and quickly as they can with the bottom line in mind and very little else while the government acts as more of a regulator than a supporter of education. All of Nasra schools, both those created by my grandmother and under NPS, are committed to the lowest segment of society because it’s a segment that is underserved and falls between the cracks.”
NPS places a maximum cap on the average monthly tuition fee to ensure the schools are consistently affordable for low-income families. All of its teachers — 95 percent of which are women — are trained through the Education Trust’s program using high-quality materials and modern curricula, so they can compete with their more expensive counterparts. NPS also rents, rather than purchases, space throughout Karachi, to allow for faster expansion of its schools.
It’s hasn’t been easy for Amir to turn his grandmother’s benevolence into a business. Finding space in overpopulated Karachi and retaining educated, highly trained teachers has been difficult. Because the NPS schools are located in some of the poorest, most rundown sections of the city, Amir has had to install generators and water tanks to ensure the students have a proper learning environment. He has also had to find creative ways, like offering after-school activities and extracurricular programs, to subsidize costs while continuing to grow.
Acumen’s investment will help Nasra Public Schools open 15 new campuses over the next two years. Amir’s goal is to expand beyond Karachi and open campuses across Pakistan — and he believes it’s possible with his team.
“We have a very good team of people,” Amir said. “They have been with us for 30, maybe, 40 years. These are women who my grandmother nurtured and who run the schools like a family. You can see their passion and how proud they are of their students and the schools. My grandmother gave so much to this country. I can’t fill her shoes, but her name will carry forward with these women and with Nasra Public Schools. That void she left behind, however, will always be there.”
