Christian women in Pakistan face many pressures. Because they are Christians it is almost impossible to gain employment or training. They have little ability to become financially independent. Women are often ostracized and suffer various forms of abuse because of their faith. Sometimes they are forced to marry and cannot break free from bondage.

As everyone knows, there are major issues in Pakistan. It appears to be a country that harbours and produces extremists. However, the majority of the people are not extremists. To help break down barriers between religious groups and foster understanding, Barbara Gill has established a school in Islamabad.

The EGM team are constantly looking for ways to assist the poorest among them to become self-sustaining. They have organised sewing projects in other places but not in their own community. This community is huge, the largest Christian community in Pakistan, with tens of thousands of Christian families.

In a country like Pakistan, correspondence courses are an effective means of training. It is not easy for people of other faiths to obtain access to the real story. This is also a useful tool for Christian people to be discipled and nurtured in their faith.

This project is established to train Christian women and girls to develop a skill and the opportunity for income generation. This area is rural and on the border with India and surrounded by military installations. As with other similar projects this will empower a number of women who are poorly educated and who have few options for anything other than a life of servitude.

For many years there has been a movement of Afghan people into Pakistan as a result of the ongoing, chronic unrest in the country. Peshawar is one of the main places that Afghan refugees settle. Many of these people are uneducated and unable to fend for themselves, and so become very vulnerable, especially the young women.

Chak no 74 is a small village in Faisalabad district with approximately 5,000 families living there, only 300 of whom are Christians. Most of the population is uneducated with parents preferring their children to work instead of study so many young boys and girls are sent to work at an early age due to poverty. In particular, parents are not sending girls to college after school because of a lack of finances and transport issues so girls stay home and wait to be married. Any sort of skill is therefore a great blessing for them and a sewing course can have a huge impact in a girl’s life.

The brick kilns in Pakistan are notorious for child labour and human slavery. More than one million children are working in the brick kilns just in Punjab alone. They do not go to school and are illiterate. Many are forced into early marriages, especially the girls. It is a hard life and our partners there want to see things change and set people free. Education is an important part of the solution.

This partnership sees the establishment of a fund to assist high performing students get other forms of post-secondary school training. Many Christian young people finish school with good grades but because of poverty at home or not knowing the right people they struggle to get jobs. This programme is to bridge that gap, to get them into good institutions and to the front of the employment line.

For two years BHW has been supporting sewing training courses near to Faisalabad. This project is to enable the women who have been trained to sew to earn a better living for their families by sewing garments for sale.

There are many young people in Pakistan who struggle to gain significant employment. To gain an advantage over others in the competitive market it's important to be as well trained in computers as possible. Information technology is a very important field in which to be proficient.

Edward Qasar and his father, Pastor Manzoor Jalal, have had a long term vision to establish a sewing factory in Lahore to both provide employment for local people and generate income for their ministry in Pakistan. The plan is to develop this factory so that eventually it will employ around 300 people.

There are more and more young people moving into the Chaklala area as the community develops. There are many issues associated with you people, especially drug use. There is little for the local youths to do and our partners there want to provide something positive for them that will help them with their education as well. Hence, the computer centre.

The town of Rawat is the gateway to Islamabad and is an old historic town. Because of the Muslim domination all the Christians are very poor and no Christian from Rawat has finished high school. This partnership seeks to provide hope for these people by teaching women to sew and thereby giving them a way of gaining worthwhile employment and financially supporting their families.

The rural people in Pakistan are mainly poor peasants and daily labourers. Most Christian people in these areas are at the bottom of the food chain, the poorest of the poor. This partnership seeks to help them by training women to sew thus enabling them to increase their household income and at the very least to save money on their costs.

When a woman has a skill like sewing they are able to make a large contribution to the family economics. They are able to save a lot of expense buying clothes and often they are able to even earn some money, all while staying at home.

Heavy monsoon rains have flooded much of Pakistan displacing thousands of families and leaving millions homeless, but as yet no major relief efforts have begun to reach the hardest hit regions.

For a number of years Azam and Barbara Gill have been working with poor communities, trying to help them become better educated, helping women to train so they can earn an income and helping families to grow strong. One of the great barriers they face is illiteracy amongst the adults. In the past, education has not been valued and this is now creating much poverty.

The inability of people in rural communities in Pakistan to read is having widespread consequences. Young people are especially affected as they are not equipped to gain employment and they are then left in the villages with little incentive and few skills to become self sustaining.

For a number of years BHW has been supporting a sewing programme in Rawat township. Many women have been trained to sew and now are able to support their families because of this. As well, at the request of the community, adult literacy classes were run, mainly to help the local Christian adults to learn to read. On the back of these two successful programmes the young people in Rawat have asked for a computer training programme.

Azam Gill has been involved in full-time ministry in Pakistan since 2002 and is very passionate about the gospel. He is fearless and travels around a lot encouraging, mentoring and training people. He sees the need to equip people to become self-sustaining educationally and economically.

Khaliq Nager is like a rural village in the middle of Lahore. This community has about 17,500 people. Many are poor, most are illiterate and place no value on educating their children, especially the girls. There is no school, no clean water, no medical or health center and most of the families have no toilet in their homes. The EGM team has a vision to transform the community and a strong component of this is to empower uneducated women by training them to sew.

Pakistan is one of the top five countries worldwide improving access to clean water but despite this progress 22 million people still have no choice but to drink dirty water. Christians are facing a water crisis because they generally live in slum areas of cities and there are no development programs there from metropolitan or central governments.