Measuring education

No government since Partition has ever allocated more than four per cent of GDP to education and the current allocation is around 2.9 per cent when taken as a national figure but with wide provincial variations. The devolution of education budgets to the provinces has proved to be a mixed blessing as, in many cases, education budgets are underspent, in part because of a lack of bureaucratic capacity. Pakistan is going to miss its Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s) in education by a considerable margin and overall education development has regressed rather than advanced. According to government figures, the literacy rate has risen from 35 per cent in 1990/1 to 58 per cent today, but the MDG target of 88 per cent by 2015 is now beyond reach.

A recurrent problem in the education sector relates to the gathering of accurate data, particularly relating to the thousands of non-formal schools that operate. An innovative and seemingly effective monitoring scheme with teachers reporting by SMS was initiated in October last year by the Punjab Literacy and Non-formal Basic Education (LNFBE) unit. They now receive daily updates from 4,000 of the 5,000 non-formal schools across the province and more schools are to be signed up for the scheme which gives details of enrolments, school attendance and visits by monitoring officers. Teachers’ mobile phones are registered with the LNFBE and send monthly reports regarding enrolments, dropouts and whether they have received their salaries. For the first time, a comprehensive picture can be built on which future planning decisions may be based. Teachers feel a sense of connectivity with the system, which is relatively cheap and simple to implement and provides objective hard data on a daily and monthly basis — a quality of reporting yet to be established in the formal sector. It is not a leap of imagination to see the scheme running in other provinces and Pakistan has taken a small step up the education ladder.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 13^th, 2013.

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