KHYBER: The local education office has provided five non-formal community schools with seven prefabricated classrooms in the Tirah Valley of upper Bara in Khyber district.

Sources told Dawn that two prefabricated classrooms were installed each in Kandaw Jumaat and Dray Wandi villages, while one each was installed in Sheikhmali, Sandana and Nangrosa villages, where around 500 girls and boys have been without formal school buildings since 2022 when around 3,000 families returned to their homes after remaining displaced for almost a decade due to militancy and military operations.

The five community schools were either operating inside damaged houses, a portion of a hujra, a mosque, or under walnut trees with no furniture and only one teacher.

Dosti Welfare Organisation, an NGO, and the Frontier Corps North had helped establish these five schools in 2023.

Initiative to benefit 500 girls and boys

A charity, Sipah Khidmat-i-Khalq Welfare Society, spearheaded the campaign to acquire the fabricated classrooms for the five community schools after the reconstruction of over 50 destroyed formal schools in Bara.

China Aid, a non-profit, had in 2016-17 provided 25 prefabricated classrooms to damaged schools in Bara to provide shelter to students, who were enrolled in government schools after the return of displaced families in 2015-16.

The fabricated classrooms were later dismantled after the reconstruction of all the damaged schools, and were placed in stores at different locations with officials of the district education office responsible for their future utilisation.

Meanwhile, Sipah Khidmat-i-Khalq Welfare Society and elders approached the education officials and elected representatives to provide these fabricated classrooms to five community schools.

However, it took them about two years to convince both the elected representatives and the district education office to agree to the installation of at least seven such rooms in five community schools of Upper Bara.

The transportation and installation of these rooms was marred by bickering between MPA Abdul Ghani and Naveed Afridi, brother of Chief Minister Suhail Afridi, as they wanted to take credit for the initiative.

The issue, however, was resolved with the intervention of local mediators who decided that both ‘parties’ would assist in the transportation and installation of these rooms at the designated locations.

It was also learnt that initially the district education officials, too, were reluctant to ‘donate’ these rooms to community schools as they insisted that only formal schools in Khyber where there was a shortage of classrooms were entitled to these ‘temporary shelters’.

Published in Dawn, July 23rd, 2026