‘Sesame Street’ launches in Pakistan
Posted November 26, 2011 8:57 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
The makers of the US TV show Sesame Street launched a new puppet show in Pakistan on Saturday.
The programme was jointly developed by Sesame Workshop, the creator of the American children’s series, and Rafi Peer Theater Workshop, a Pakistani group that has been staging puppet shows for more than three decades.
The show, called Sim Sim Hamara, received $20 million from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
“I think, we have had a really good take off on making a Sesame Sim Sim Hamara which belongs to Pakistan,” Faizaan Peerzada, the chief operating officer of Rafi Peer and one of several family members who run the organization, told the audience at launching ceremony in Pakistan’s cultural capital Lahore.
“It has Pakistani characters, it has content which is specially designed for Pakistan and there is a lot of development on the side of making an international level production.”
The shows will appear on Pakistan state television in late December and the producers hope they will reach three million children, one million of whom are out of school.
A total of 78 episodes will be aired in Pakistan’s national language, Urdu, over the next three years, as well as 13 in each of the four main regional languages, Baluchi, Pashtu, Punjabi and Sindhi.
The TV show has a new cast of local characters. The lead character is a six-year-old girl named Rani who loves cricket and traditional Pakistani music. Another character, Munna, is a five-year-old boy obsessed with numbers.
Baily the donkey, Haseen O Jameel the crocodile and Baaji, a strong woman, are a few of the other characters.
The programme is expected to help the educational difficulties of children without access to schooling and reflect messages of inclusion and mutual respect.
“A programme like this can bring forth the children of Pakistan to understand all the ideas with inclusion of kindness to one another, mutual respect and equal opportunity. And I think, that’s one of the things that we are very very pleased to be a part of to be able to sponsor that,” said U.S. Consul General, Nina Maria Fite.
In addition to the television show, the USAID-funded project will include radio programmes for parents and other care-givers, live puppet shows, mobile video shows, a website with e-books, games, and children’s songs.
Educational curriculum will focus on language development, critical thinking, and cognitive processes.
According to figures from UNESCO and other non-governmental organisations, roughly one in 10 of the world’s primary-age children who are not in school live in Pakistan, placing Pakistan second in the global ranking of out-of-school children, behind Nigeria.
The World Bank approved a $400-million loan earlier this year for Pakistan’s flailing education system, one of the world’s worst where the country spends less than 1.5 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on schooling.
