Islamic Relief started working in Pakistan in 1992 and was registered in 1994 as a Company Limited by Guarantee under Section 42 of the Companies Ordinance, 1984. Since its inception the office has successfully implemented many relief and development projects in the sectors of Water & Sanitation, Health, Education, Income Generation, Disaster Preparedness & Response and Orphans support in Pakistan and Azad Jammu & Kashmir (AJ&K).
 

lslamic Relief Pakistan (IRP)is sponsoring more than 1000 orphan children whose families are widows headed and are not aware of their basic rights, most of them do not have citizenship documentation which does not allow them to benefit from government schemes for orphans and widows and can not participate in electoral process. In response to this, IRP started its Legal Aid for Widows project which is funded by European Commission (EC).
 

Project have been completed successfully on 30th September 2006

It was an 18 month project and completed on 30th September 2006. It envisaged helping 700 widow families living in different poor areas of Rawalpindi. A baseline survey was conducted to gather details of widowed families, legal documents (identity card, B- Form, Birth certificates, death certificates) acquired by the families, inheritance issues faced by the widows, tax related issues, bank accounts etc . The findings told that there are large number of widows who lack basic legal documents and facing inheritance and other legal issues.
LAW team adapted multi task approach to timely achieve the targets. At one side field staff gathered basic information and organised awareness sessions and legal aid camps within the targeted areas. Adult Literacy team with the support of field staff identified widows in need to learn basic reading and writing skills. Whereas the legal adviser and family lawyer directly dealt with the legal cases by providing legal counselling, liaising widows with National Database and Registration Authority for procurement of citizenship documents and different Banks for opening accounts. 
Two sessions each of six months were held for those widows who never had the opportunity to attend school while young and wished to acquire reading, writing, counting and other life skills. A literacy centre was opened in Peerwadhai one of the most poor areas in Rawalpindi and IR developed its own target group context specific literacy material. Around 180 widows were enrolled in both these sessions and among these 160 successfully completed these sessions.
Four big seminars were held in Islamabad and attended by different human right activists, NGO representatives, lawyers, government officials, journalists and beneficiaries themselves. These helped greatly to create awareness about the legal issues faced by widows. Apart from this two workshops were conducted with male and female Union councillors and some Nazims from targeted areas to sensitize them about their role in protection of right of widows.

It has been a very unique experience for IR in general and for IR Pakistan office in particular. It not only benefited a large number of widows and orphans but it also built IR capacity to implement further such purely right based project in future.