Pakistan: Education targets remain elusive

Pakistan needs a strong literacy movement to achieve its targets of increasing the literacy rate up to 86 percent by the year 2015, and ensuring that every child had access to education, according to the report of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The present government successfully achieved the targets of formulating a National Education Policy 2009, inserting Article 25-A in the constitution under 18th amendment and achieving tremendous progress in the higher education sector to realize the dream of becoming a literate nation, and yet a lot of work still has to be done. The recently passed ‘Right to Free Education Bill’ was a landmark initiative for educating around 68,000 school children in the federal capital. This bill will ensure their access to the right to free education, making ICT a model for all provinces to follow. Talking to sources, renowned education expert, Professor Fateh Malik said that it was the responsibility of the state to provide free education to every citizen. He lauded the efforts of senators towards the implementation of the Article 25-A, for the betterment of future generations. "It was only Zulfikar Bhutto who brought revolutionary reforms in the education sector by making education free and compulsory for all the children," Malik said. "Private institutes were nationalized by Bhutto and salaries of teachers of private institutes were made equal to the salaries of government teachers," he said. Education was the backbone of any country and Article 25-A would provide free education to those children who were deprived of education due to poverty and had to resort to child labor, he said. According to the UNESCO report, 54 percent women in the country are still illiterate among of which, 64 percent rural women are from Punjab, 69 percent from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 78 percent from Sindh and 87 percent of rural women belong to Balochistan. The report says that the country had 18.64 million illiterate people in the year 1951, 22.08 million in 1961, 33.59 million in 1972, 42.69 million in 1981, 50.38 million in 1998 and 55.24 million in the year 2010. With a reported literacy rate of 56 percent in the year 2010 according to the Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement (PSLM) 2010, Pakistan is among the least literate nations of the world. According to the UNDP's International Human Development Indicators database, Pakistan ranks 130 among 141 reporting countries and territories in terms of adult literacy. The hurdles include lack of political will, leadership and a clear strong policy on literacy and Non Formal Basic Education (NFBE), absence of permanent organizational structure for Literacy and NFBE in provinces leading to coordination gap, meager and inconsistent financial assistance and capacity gap.