The northern areas of Pakistan were devastated by an earthquake of magnitude 7.6 on the Richter scale on the morning of October 8, 2005. This was the most devastating natural disaster in the history of the country. Official reports of infrastructure damage and of the lives lost put the death toll at over 77,000, with another 3.3 million people rendered homeless. The total cost of reconstruction was estimated by the Government of Pakistan and International Aid agencies to be in the range of USD 6 to 7 billion.

While these figures of death and destruction are in themselves monumental, the biggest tragedy was that nearly half of the casualties in this disaster were children, killed when the roofs of their schools collapsed on them on that school morning. Hundreds of schools in the affected areas were reduced to rubble and as newspaper headlines screamed over the next few days, a whole generation was lost in a matter of seconds.