Pakistan must live up to promise to build more girls' schools, activists say

Zofeen Ebrahim, Annie Banerji

One in three girls and one in five boys miss out on primary school in Pakistan, campaigners said on Tuesday, urging the new government to live up to promises to build more girls’ schools despite attacks by militants opposed to female education.

Nearly 22.5 million of Pakistan’s estimated 50 million children are out of school, most of them girls, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report, highlighting problems of poverty, lack of federal investment and a shortage of government schools.

“The number of out-of-school children in particular, and girls specifically, is on the rise and the number of government schools are not increasing in the same proportion,” Saroop Ijaz, a lawyer with HRW told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

At around the age of 14, only 13 percent girls are still in education, he said, attributing this mainly to a shortage in secondary schools for girls, as well sexual harassment, early marriage, gender discrimination and abusive teachers.

Mosharraf Zaidi, a senior fellow at policy think tank Tabadlab, said there is a girls’ education crisis in Pakistan, where four out of five schools are primaries, meaning that girls often have to travel long distances to attend secondary school.

“Safe, accessible and plentiful schools for girls are a distant dream in Pakistan,” he said.

Worldwide, more than 130 million girls are out of school, costing the global economy as much as $30 trillion, according to the World Bank.

Pakistani Taliban and allied Islamist militants, who regard girls education as anti-Islam, have been attacking thousands of schools for young women in northwestern and northern parts of Pakistan.