The most difficult transition in Admiral Mohammad Asif Sandila’s life may not have happened at sea. It came in October 2014, when he handed over command of the Pakistan Navy and stepped away from the institution that had shaped more than four decades of his life. The uniform, authority and daily structure were gone. What remained was a question faced by many people after a long career: what should come next? Sandila’s answer would take him far from warships and naval headquarters, but not from the idea of service.
One episode from his naval career helps explain that sense of responsibility. On 26 December 2004, Sandila was a commodore leading a Pakistan Navy mission in the Maldives when the Indian Ocean tsunami struck. The Pakistani ships had arrived for goodwill and training activities, but all exercises were stopped as islands flooded and communications failed. Working with the Maldives Coast Guard, the naval crews used ships and helicopters to reach affected communities. PNS Tariq rescued 367 tourists of several nationalities from an area about 100 nautical miles south of Malé. The crews also shared food, drinking water, medicines and other supplies, even though they had not been prepared for a disaster of that size. The New Humanitarian documented the operation at the time.
Sandila later became Pakistan’s 19th Chief of the Naval Staff, serving from 2011 until his retirement in 2014. The Maldives had already honoured him with the Nishaan Muleege Sharafge Izzaiy for his role in rescue, evacuation, damage assessment and relief delivery during the tsunami. Yet retirement required a different kind of leadership. Sandila had grown up with firsthand knowledge of education in a modest rural setting. After travelling widely and reaching the Navy’s highest office, he remained conscious that many Pakistani children were still beginning life without safe classrooms, trained teachers or meaningful opportunities. He decided that his next chapter would focus on them.
With a group of like-minded colleagues, he founded the Moawin Foundation in 2014 and remains its chairman. Its education programme began the following year with two government schools in Sheikhupura. The decision to work through existing public schools was central to Sandila’s new mission. Government schools were already present in communities and open to families unable to afford private education. The challenge was to make them work better. Rather than concentrating only on new buildings, the foundation combined repairs and essential facilities with teacher training, early-childhood education and digital learning. This was slower and less visible than commanding a rescue operation. A school cannot be transformed in a single intervention. Teachers need continued support, facilities require maintenance and communities must remain involved.
The work has since expanded well beyond its original two schools. According to the foundation’s February 2026 fact sheet, it had adopted 338 government schools serving more than 45,668 students. Over 27,400 of them were girls, accounting for about 60 per cent of enrolment, while more than 3,686 teachers had received training. These figures are reported by the organisation itself and should not be mistaken for an independent assessment of learning quality. Their importance lies in showing how Sandila’s retirement project grew from a local experiment into a wider effort to strengthen public education. The real test will be whether children attend regularly, remain in school and leave with stronger knowledge, confidence and opportunities.
His understanding of education has also widened. In January 2024, Moawin Foundation entered a partnership with Niaz Support to identify children with disabilities who needed mobility assistance and provide customised wheelchairs. Niaz Support designs wheelchairs according to individual measurements and physical requirements, an approach consistent with World Health Organization guidance on assessment, fitting, training and follow-up. The partnership recognised a simple truth: improving a classroom means little to a child who cannot reach or enter it. A wheelchair may provide mobility, but real inclusion also requires accessible transport, entrances, classrooms and toilets. Education must begin by removing the barriers that prevent a child from participating at all.
Sandila’s present journey is therefore not an attempt to recreate his naval career in civilian life. It is a transformation of what that career taught him. At sea, leadership meant responding quickly when lives were in immediate danger. In education, it means accepting that change may take years and continuing even when progress is difficult to see. He now builds partnerships instead of commanding fleets and measures success through opportunities created rather than operations completed. The sea once asked him to help people survive a disaster. Pakistan’s classrooms now ask something quieter but just as demanding: that he help children build futures before their opportunities disappear. Retirement did not end his service. It changed the people waiting on the other side of it.
