About Us
Zoya Science Schools: Lighting the Path to Knowledge
Zoya Science Schools—currently eight in remote villages of South Punjab serve over 3,500 underprivileged children. Each child receives free textbooks, and at one school, a daily hot meal. The schools support orphans/underprivileged children and their families with clean drinking water (via tube wells installed at their homes, and in government schools), Eid gifts/Ramzan packages, and clothes stitched in the on-site Sewing Center (where young girls learn sewing).
Typically, each school is established and supported by the family of Zoya Khawaja and friends, on land donated by the local community, until a sustainable funding source is secured, such as a partnership with the Punjab Education Foundation (PEF). Schools partnering with PEF are independently run by their administrators.
The schools may join the Zoya Science and Welfare Society, which promotes science and math with videos, posters, poems, songs, and booklets in the children’s mother language–Seraiki
Libraries feature world authors like Hemingway, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Prem Chand, Rumi, Gogol, etc.—alongside Kalam science books and global children’s stories, including the full catalog of the National Book Foundation’s children’s titles.
The schools are the vision of Sarmad Khawaja, whose brief biography follows:
Sarmad Khawaja served at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) from 1994 to 2010, including as Advisor and Resident Representative in Central Asian countries.
Earlier, he worked at the Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague (1990–1994) as Senior Researcher and Advisor for reforming Pakistan’s national accounts statistics.
He was Visiting Professor at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration, Bergen (1991), a Fulbright Post-Doctoral Fellow at Harvard University (1985–86), and Chief Economist at the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (1980 to 1989).
He co-authored two books on Pakistan’s economy: External Shocks and Adjustment (Oxford University Press, 1997); Pakistan’s Economy Through the Seventies (PIDE, 1984). He has also published articles in international journals and institutional reports of PIDE, IMF and ISS.
He has published three volumes of the collected works of his great-grandfather Alif Din Nafees, Islam and Tolerance, 2020
and Lessons of My Life by his father, Prof. Khwaja Masud. Ilqa Publications, 2012
His most recent work is Nawan Sij – A Rock Opera for Children (Zoya Schools, 2024).
His op-ed articles in The News may be accessed at this link: https://www.thenews.com.pk/writer/sarmad-khawaja
E-mail address: Sarmad.Khawaja@gmail.com