Right to education: ‘We need to bring change before celebrating Women’s Day’

Experts shed light on lack of education among the female population of the country.


Our Correspondent March 09, 2013
The stipends for the girl students of grade six to 10 in rural areas had helped increase their enrolment from 180,000 to 400,000. PHOTO: FILE

KARACHI: In a country marred with some of the world’s largest gender disparities in education, civil society activists, journalists and government representatives appeared sceptical in defining a cause for the International Women’s Day celebration.

During a dialogue session organised by Idaara-e-Taleem-o-Aagahi (ITA) on Friday, the participants resolved that the challenge of gender inequality in education, unless addressed properly through awareness to bring change in mindsets, poses a question mark for the country’s future.

“In relation to our current standing, I wonder why we are even celebrating the day as the situation demands us to analyse the quantum of success,” remarked Pervaiz Ahmed Seehar, who heads the Sindh Education Department’s reform support unit, while opening the discussion that was moderated by Qaiser Shahzad of the ITA. “Despite celebrating women’s day every year, we fail to practically address the issues of the marginalised community,” she added.



ITA Regional Manager Afshan Razzak noted that more than 5.1 million primary school-aged children in Pakistan had not attended school and a two-third of them were girls. While referring to the Global Monitoring Report, she said that girls in rural Sindh were the most disadvantaged as more than half have never attended school.

“Education in this country remains a second option while people continue to priorities things such as acquiring interest-based loans for marriages of their daughters,” she said, adding that even religion terms education as an obligation and marriage is designated as sunnah.

The reform support unit’s deputy programme manager, Saba Mushtaq, however, said that the stipends for the girl students of grade six to 10 in rural areas had helped increase their enrolment from 180,000 to 400,000. Mushtaq accepted that while every locality has a school, the government has been unable to provide facilities and teachers.

Social activist Farah Iqbal Lodhi pointed out that the disparity could only be diminished when the educated and privileged ones stand up to change the general psyche of associating education only with employment and not with benefits at a personal level.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 9th, 2013.

 

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