Educational ambitions

The plan to enrol some 5.1 million children, who are currently out of school, by 2016 is unlikely to materialise. This is a sad reflection on our reality, the lack of funding available for education and the low priority that it holds. Pakistan’s expenditure on education, which for years has stood at around two per cent of GDP, sometimes rising a little above this mark, sometimes falling below, remains the lowest among South Asian nations and among the lowest in the world. This is one reason why some 6.7 million children, aged between five and nine years, remain out of school.

The minister of state for education, Balighur Rehman, has been taking an interest in resolving the issue and moving the country closer to that elusive target of 100 per cent school enrolment. For this purpose, he has rolled out an ambitious plan, comprising a four-tiered strategy. Under this, more children are to be enrolled in schools with existing capacity; new rooms are to be built at schools where space exists; new informal schools set up in remote areas to improve access and incentive schemes introduced to keep children, especially girls, at school. The plan covers all four provinces, as well as the Islamabad Capital Territory, Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan. Punjab hopes that under this scheme of action, enrolment will be up to 100 per cent by 2016. The target for other areas is slightly more modest.

Education deserves priority and we are pleased to see attention directed towards it. But there seems to be a very real risk that things will not work out as planned. This has been the experience of the past and the scheme fails to address key issues such as the conditions at public schools — a key factor that keeps children away from them and contributes to a very high drop-out rate. The high targets set in the plan seem, for now, sadly out of reach. But at the same time, we must continue to strive to educate our children and find realistic means to do so, moving forward one step at a time.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 9^th, 2013.

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