Title	Scholarship Award Ceremony 2025	Venue	CM House , KP
Date	0000-00-00	Participants	500
Category	Scholarship Awards Ceremony

Description:

PESHAWAR: Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Chief Minister Muhammad Sohail Afridi on Monday announced Rs 300 million for the KP Education Foundation to accommodate more talented and deserving students in its ongoing fully funded scholarship programme. The announcement was made at the Scholarship Cheques and Medal Distribution Ceremony for BS and MS students belonging to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, including the merged districts, studying in top universities across the country. The chief minister was the chief guest on the occasion, while the ceremony was also addressed by Minister for Local Government Meena Khan, Secretary Higher Education Kamran Khan Afridi, and Managing Director of KP Education Foundation, Zariful Maani. The vice-chancellors, faculty members and students of various universities and other higher education institutions from across the province participated in the ceremony in large numbers. Speaking on the occasion, Sohail Afridi said that investing in human capital was the top priority of the provincial government and education and health were the focused areas for the purpose. He said that in higher education more attention was being focused on market-oriented subjects to improve employability. He added that soon the government would launch a mega internship programme for young graduates to address the growing issue of joblessness. He announced Rs 300 million for the KPEF scholarship programme, including Rs 100 million for students hailing from the merged districts and Rs 200 million for the settled districts of the province. Meena Khan said that merit and transparency were the major challenges faced by the provincial government. He said that they have effectively tackled these issues and ensured merit-based appointments through ETEA and overall meritocracy and transparency in higher education. He said that the provincial government would soon make appointments of 3086 teachers in various colleges in the province purely on merit.Zariful Maani highlighted some initiatives that the KP EF has taken during the last one year. He said that the major achievement of the foundation was the establishment of its own building on its plot which had been laying unutilized for the last 22 years. The foundation had been functioning in a rented building and they were compelled to pay Rs 0.5 million rent and around Rs 0.2 million as utility bills each month. He said that the foundation’s own building was set up within the shortest span of just two months after the approval of the Board of Governors in an extremely low-cost prefabricated structure with a fully solarized electricity system. “We have already shifted the foundation to the new building and got rid of the heavy rent and utility bills,” he said. The second major initiative of the foundation was the introduction of a fully digitized scholarship regime to ensure transparency, he said. Now a proper mechanism has been devised for the award of scholarships and human involvement has been almost excluded from the process, he said. He added that just a few days ago new scholarships were advertised and so far, some 14,000 students have applied for it, while the deadline was still days away. The registration will hopefully reach 30,000 by the given deadline, he said. “But the slots we have for the scholarships are just 227. I will request the chief minister, who is also chairman of the foundation’s Board of Governors, to enhance the slots to at least 500,” he added. The ceremony was arranged to distribute scholarships among BS and MS students for the 2024-25 session under the KPEF merit-cum-unaffordability scholarships and the Chief Minister’s Higher Education Endowment Fund scholarships. The KPEF has awarded 7350 scholarships worth Rs 261.072 million to students since 2002.The foundation has introduced a fully automated, transparent digital scholarship system which ensures merit, transparency and gender parity. The programme has been extended to 49 universities across the country. The digital portal for the scholarship programme provides a digital quantification system eliminating human intervention, while ISO certification for the scholarships portal will be acquired soon. During 2024-25, some 13,165 students made registrations on the KPEF scholarships portal, of which 3,669 applications were received and 227 students were awarded the scholarship purely on the basis of merit and need. Due to limited funds, only six percent of the total applicants were given the scholarship, according to official documents of KPEF. During 2024-25, KPEF applicants of emerging sciences, including Artificial Intelligence, cyber security, data sciences, allied health sciences, fin-tech and software engineering, secured the maximum number of scholarships - 37 percent of the total awards, while students of General Science got 16.7 percent, Political Science, English and Economics 16 percent, Biological Sciences 15.2 percent, Engineering and Agricultural Sciences three percent each, and other fields of BS and MS degree programs got 16 percent. In KPEF scholarships, priority is given to orphans, minorities, transgender students and persons with disabilities, while BISP-registered students receive special consideration and Hafiz-e-Quran applicants are given additional weightage. The KPEF has introduced dashboard-based university coordination and auto-ranking to ensure fair, unbiased evaluation of candidates.The institutional interviews are fully integrated into the digital system, with a track-and-trace system to ensure quick verification and payment monitoring, while scholarship renewal is subject to academic progress and attendance, Zariful Maani said. For swift and transparent disbursement of funds, a scholarship card for direct student payments will be introduced soon so that the students could receive payments without delay. The Planning and Management Unit of the Higher Education Department under the Chief Minister’s Higher Education Endowment Fund Scholarships, since its establishment in 2014, has also so far awarded 586 scholarships, including 462 male and 124 female students enrolled in various undergraduate and post-graduate programmes.