Keeping up with its mission to 'Educate Pakistan', The Supporters of Citizens Foundation (STCF) hosted the finale of an inter-school fund raising and singing competition, Obhartay Sitaray (OS) 2019 - on Saturday.

First Lady Samina Atif Alvi was chief guest at singing competition for school going students from classes 3-13, aimed at developing national pride in young generation as only Pakistani songs (ghazal, Pop/filmi, Milli/folk and chorus) were selected for the competition. First lady said that the activity encouraged healthy competition amongst students and schools. Moreover, it is a platform to engage young Pakistanis in charity and motivate them to take ownership of TCF.

She also recalled her association with TCF and vowed to support it to promote the education cause.

The competition started with preliminary rounds from 4th to 8th November followed by the Finale on November 16th which is a competition amongst the best voices in each genre. Over 200+ teams from 136 school units of Karachi participated in the competition. The Finale competition was judged by Tina Sani, Sultan Arshad, Salman Alvi, Shahid Hamid, Afshan Ahmed and S B John.

The event provided a unified platform to support educational efforts being extended by TCF for the less privileged students, at the same time encouraging the young, emerging talent of Pakistan. For the past 24 years TCF has been vigorously following its mission of taking children off the street and into schools. It continues to work with the same zeal, passion and commitment as when it started off with its first 5 schools. Today TCF has an enrolment of 252,000 students in 1,567 campuses with a 50 percent male/female ratio.

Commenting on this event Yasmeen Nageeb Basir, head of the programme said: "We started OS 8 years back, with only a few schools but over the years it has almost doubled. A few of us devised this programme and from year one it took off. We realised our country has so much talent and children who could sing did not get the opportunity to show their talent.

Now students from OS are performing at different platforms and a few recently went abroad to perform with Salman Ahmed. Moreover, this is a two pronged programme where children also raise funds for other children happily and realise that this country needs education."