Letter to the editor
Noor Sher Khan
The constitution of Pakistan legislates free and compulsory education for all children between the ages of 5-16 years. Moreover, the 18th constitutional amendment transferred education to federating units. Pakistan needs serious policy measures to achieve its vision 2030. The vision 2030 is a commitment to achieve an ideal academic system with one curriculum and one examination system. Pakistan also stands short of its goal to achieve 88% literacy rate by 2015.
The vision goals included increasing public expenditure to 7% by 2015, reintroduction of the technical and vocational educational stream and its increase to 25-30% by 2015 and the general enhancement in quality of education.
However, Pakistan in 2014 spent only 2.4% of the GDP on education of which 89% includes current expenditure and only 11% is reserved for education develoment. Institute of social and policy sciences in its report on provincial spending on education for 2014-15 states that KPK spent 26%, Punjab 24%, Sindh 22% and Balochistan 19%. Out of this the major spending has been on recurrent expenses and salary budget with Balochistan spending 29%, KPK 24%, Punjab 15% and Sindh 10% on developmental spending. Except for Punjab, the development budget of other provinces remained relatively unused in 2013-14.
According to the United Nations Global Education Monitoring Report 2016 in Pakistan, only about 10% of poor children complete lower secondary school, compared to 75% of rich children.Moreover, children in rich quintile have substantilly 8 more years of education than children in poor quintile.Furthermore, the literacy rate of poor rural males is 64%,compared to 14% for their female counterparts.Primary enrolment rates among the displaced are
40% at refugee sites in Pakistan. Enrolment rates are substantially lower at the secondary level: only 4% of 12- to
17-year-old refugees were enrolled in school. Pakistan has 21.5 million out of school children at primary, lower secondary and upper secondary level.
There is a need for implementation of national education policy and vision 2030 education goals.Government as well as non-government sector should work together to promote education in rural areas.The provincial education departments need to work out financial resources and form legislations and design educational policies which ensure quality education. Providing economic incentives to the students may encourage the parents to send their children to school and may help in reducing the dropout ratio. Local government system is helpful in promoting education and literacy in the country. In local government system the funds for education would be spent on a need basis by the locality.
Only the cumulative efforts of governmental, private and NGO organizations with commitments to formal, informal and vocational education training can reduce illiteracy in Pakistan.
