In financial year 2010-2011, we received Rs. 2,205,800 in donations.
Standard Chartered Bank and Jaffer Brothers continue to be our largest donors and we remain eternally grateful to them for helping us support more students every year. With the grace of Allah and your generous support, 25 Rizwan Scholars graduated in 2011. We receive innumerable applications every week and shortlist all the qualifying applicants for scholarship interviews. We try very hard to support as many as we can but we are restricted by our budget. Interviews are usually held twice a year in Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad with our team of mentors but on rare occasions we also interview waitlisted students outside of schedule as soon as our budget increases.
We receive many donations online as well through Give2Asia. That bucket is emptied every 3 to 4 years. This is a very secure and convenient method of donating to Riz Scholars and we highly recommend it. In other news of 2011, our scholars send us their updates regularly. Some of the highlights of 2011 are listed below.
Dr Liaqat Ali Khan, one of our graduate scholars started working on a project in 2011 titled Medicines Sans Frontiers-Belgium i.e doctors without borders. He has recently passed FCPS-1 Exam in Surgery.
Another graduate scholar, Dr. Mohammad Safdar also completed his DVM degree and is presently in Turkey getting his Master of Genetics on scholarship.
Naila Qayyum graduated with 1st position in BSc in 2011 from Lakki Marwat Girls Degree College. She achieved 447 out of 550. She continues to be a Rizwan Scholar and is now pursuing her MS in Bio Chemistry at Quaid-e-Azam University Islamabad. We are very proud of our scholar and wish her every success in the future.
The proudest moment for us in 2011 was when we received an email from our graduate scholar Syed Abbas Bukhari who wrote that he was pursuing an MS in Bioinformatics at Univeristy of Illinois on full scholarship. He wanted to know the full amount of his undergraduate scholarship, which he received from us so he could donate it back to Riz Scholars. This is called paying it forward and we are extremely proud of Abbas for being the first to take that step.
It warms our hearts to know that we are able to assist these bright young Pakistanis in their educational endeavors and it is only because of your generous donations. Please don’t stop donating towards education and at tertiary level especially since that is the bridge to a better life for the students and to a brighter future of Pakistan.