One of the challenges in higher education across the world is affordability—if you have the resources, you get a great education. But most youth across the world, including in Pakistan, cannot afford higher education, even though they deserve to receive it. Research shows that education leads to better economic prospects, so one challenge that Pakistani higher education institutions face, is giving financial aid to under-resourced and deserving students.
The USAID’s Higher Education System Strengthening Activity (HESSA) is improving the process of financial aid at 16 partner universities. Part of that is examining how universities take the money that they have, spend it effectively, find the best students, and make sure that the students get the support to be successful. But a bigger part of it is finding the money, managing, and stewarding financial resources well, and raising money outside of government—from philanthropy, corporations, and families—so that partner institutions can help more students.
“We’ve been really excited about bringing together 16 universities that are committed to doing everything that they can to help deserving under-resourced students, including doing the uncomfortable thing of asking for money. We have spent a year now thinking about and discussing these things, providing training, and it’s been an incredible experience. After the initial training, the partner universities decided that they wanted to have a systematic fundraising plan,” shared Dr. Shariq Siddiqui, Assistant Professor and Director of the Muslim Philanthropy Initiative at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy.
One of the topics covered under fundraising was the importance of “linkages.” Linkages means that you identify stakeholders who relate to your institution, who can become a potential partner to donors. It is an incredible idea where just by looking far, too often, we are trying to find the people that we don’t know. But research shows that the people that you know can lead you to the important people you need to know. So, the HESSA partner universities started doing this mapping, and what they found is some amazing alumni and people within their institution that had strong connections with important industrialists. Very quickly, they took those ideas and went to the industries through these links and within few months, they were able to secure significant resources to support deserving students.
“We have developed this system, with the support of the community, that we have an endowment to help and support all the under-resourced and merit-based students so they can continue their studies. And when they graduate, they should come forward to contribute their excellence for the society,” shared Habib Mengal, Director of the Advancement Cell at Sardar Bahadur Khan Women’s University (SBKWU) in Quetta.
Research shows that if you have a fundraising plan, you are more likely to succeed in fundraising.
“We set out on this goal several months ago with these people who do five, six, seven different things already, and I wasn’t sure whether they would be able to complete one additional task of creating a fundraising plan, which they had no prior experience. And what’s exciting to see is that all 16 universities have drafted great fundraising plans in a short span of time, which is a great achievement. But then I think they did something that I was just inspired by: they didn’t keep their fundraising plans to themselves. They shared it with each other. So, all 16 universities now have access to 15 other fundraising plans,” noted Dr. Siddiqui.
There are universities across Pakistan that need this help and now they don’t have to go look anywhere else, they don’t have to find external models, they have 16 amazing champions right here in Pakistan that understand the very best of fundraising science and the local realities.
Another topic covered during HESSA’s fundraising training was the gift range chart. How do you take a big amount of money—millions—and divide it up into smaller pieces and then find the right person for the right piece. One higher education institution found this to be particularly useful:
“We divided the alumni base into three categories: small ticket, medium ticket, and large ticket; and worked on our marketing and outreach campaigns for each ticket category. I believe that through this we will have a longer and stronger impact in terms of expanding and getting more financial assistance from our alumni,” shared Dr. Khadija Bari, Director of Financial Aid Office at the Institute of Business Administration (IBA), Karachi.
Another HESSA trainee, Nauman Ali Shah, Deputy Director of Financial Aid Office at Sindh Agriculture University shared that “right after the first training, we started a process of registering our alumni. They are our ambassadors. They are working in national and international organizations, and we received over 3,000 members. We look forward to their continued support in terms of financial assistance to our deserving students, particularly females.”
By strengthening the financial aid systems, particularly fundraising mechanisms, HESSA partner universities can utilize the small, low-hanging fruit ideas that just in a course of few months, yielded millions of rupees toward higher education in Pakistan.