The NGO, Community Appraisal and Motivation Programme, raised issue with one of their employees for bringing her child to the office.
The employee in question, Zeenat Khan, who worked as a media coordinator at CAMP’s office, told Naya Daur that when she started bringing her child to the office, it was not much of an issue as the child used to sleep most of the time.
However, she said, her employers raised objections to her bringing her child to the office and told her to drop the kid at home or hire a maid.
Zeenat said that upon her asking why bringing her child to the office was such an issue, they told her that it ‘ruined the look of the office’.
Zeenat stated that she told her employers that she was unable to leave her child at the office as her parents and in-laws did not live in Peshawar.
She further said that she offered to arrange and pay for daycare facilities at the office, but her employees made excuses about there not being any space available for this purpose. They even told her that such a measure would increase their expenses.
She stated that her employees told her that they had no issues with her performance, but they could not afford to have a child in the office. She revealed that at one point, they even told her if working was not a necessity for her, she could resign.
Zeenat said that the NGO was well-funded and they had rented a bungalow in one of the most posh areas of the city, and she did not understand why they were having issues with these expenses.
She said that the project she was working for, called Da Khor Barkha (behn ka haq), was aimed at women empowerment and funded by the Commonwealth. She said that despite being a project aimed at empowerment of women, most of those employed were men at high salaries.
In the resignation letter that she wrote to Camp, Zeenat spoke of how the management had raised concerns over her bringing her child to the office. In the letter, she spoke of all the reasons why she had to bring her child to the office, and that she had offered to pay for daycare facilities.
In the letter, she also criticised CAMP for the fact that it was an organisation working for women rights, yet its employees were not being given the rights the organisation was striving for.
In the response that she got to her resignation letter, the organisation told Zeenat that her resignation was 'her own decision', and that they had advised her to make arrangements for childcare at home.
Zeenat stated that the organisation responded by saying that it was 'her decision', when in actuality, they had told her to resign if she could not solve the problem of her having to bring her child to the office.