Bleak futures

According to studies carried out by the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics in collaboration with Unicef, Pakistani children are not going to have anything close to a bright future. Only around 41 per cent of Pakistani children are attending primary school at the moment. The remaining 12.3 million have either dropped out or were never enrolled to begin with. As ever, the situation is slightly better in Punjab and for boys, but not by a big margin. For a girl child born into poverty and in a poor part of the country, the prospects are especially bleak. The study’s results, while grim, reflect a reality that the majority of us understand already because the effects of this education disaster have been felt across the country for decades. From complaints of businessmen and factory owners about their inability to find skilled workers, to stories about little children forced into labour to feed their families, there has been ample evidence for years that our education system is failing millions of Pakistanis.

Those able to reap its meagre benefits are left jobless afterwards because the economy is too weak to absorb them while the remainder do not even have hope of ever clawing their way out of minimum wage positions to a somewhat better future. Generation after generation of Pakistanis, many of whom live in rural areas or belong to the largely ignored provinces of Balochistan and Sindh, grow up to find that the deck has been stacked against them right from the start. Access to education should not be dependent on the accident of birth placing one in a more favoured locality or more prosperous home. Our ruling elite, whose children often receive education abroad, must wake up to the reality that Pakistan is essentially a country of the young and poor. A demographic that is as frightening as it is depressing. How well will our country fare, a decade or two from now when these children who can barely read or write must compete in the global economy? Unless something is done soon, Pakistan is likely to be left even further behind than it is already.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 31^st, 2016.

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