Transgender Rights
Since 1998 VISION has been working consistently on Transgender issues in Pakistan, leading to many international collaborations, projects, workshops and more.
Over the past 23 years, VISION has focused on empowering Transgender groups with long-term, self-sustaining solutions and tools they can use to campaign against and eliminate the human rights violations they experience.
VISION believes in encouraging these groups to productively serve their own communities, and helps them enhance their capacity to do so. VISION’s core philosophy is to reflect on lessons learned from experience to create more effective, better-integrated interventions. We strongly believe in equal rights for all communities, irrespective of religion, caste, sexual orientation, color and disabilities.
VISION relies heavily on scientific research-based processes and approaches to develop tools, materials and strategies that can effectively serve the best interest of vulnerable and marginalized communities of Pakistan. (See the resources page)
In early 2000 VISION was invited to become a member of ‘Center for Sexual and Bodily Rights (CSBR) in Muslim Societies’. Currently VISION is on the advisory board of CSBR based in Indonesia.
Click here to read more about VISION’s Transgender mapping projects in Mardan, Multan and Rawalpindi.
Child Rights and Child Protection
VISION is a champion of child protection and child rights. The organization’s mission emerged organically from VISION co-founder Tahir Khilji’s work with the Transgender population.
While working with a group of transgender/zennana individuals and studying their migration patterns, the age at which they left home, and why they were on the streets, VISION saw overwhelming evidence of human trafficking. Trafficking exploits all the most vulnerable groups and demographics, including children.
Since then, VISION has pioneered efforts to highlight inter-provincial child trafficking and modern-day slavery of children in Pakistan. VISION worked to eradicate child exploitation in Murree for three years. Its study, called ‘Listen to My Voice’, is based on this intervention project, and has been instrumental in engaging law makers and the judicial system in investigating the challenges and issues around child protection in Pakistan.
VISION’s work and successes have been acknowledged by the Ashoka fellowship and one of its co-founding members, Tahir Khilji, is also an Ashoka fellow. In 2015, Tahir Khilji also became an Acumen fellow with the Acumen fellowship in Pakistan.
Click here to read more about internal child trafficking in Pakistan.
