School enrolment is low and Pakistan's education levels have scarcely improved over the last 15 years despite billions of dollars spent
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – It was past midnight but eight-year-old Ismail Khan lingered in the shadows of a parking lot overlooking a stretch of upscale cafes in Pakistan’s capital, ready to wipe the dust off car windows and doors with a dirty rag that hung over his shoulder.
He earned more pity than rupees that night – and fewer rupees than the cost of a cup of cappuccino. With no classroom to attend, Ismail is one of 25 million children across Pakistan deprived of schooling and trying to make a living.
Over half of the country’s children aged between 5 and 16 lack access to basic education and despite multiple federal government programmes and 1.97 billion dollars from 18 foreign donors between 1997 and 2012, the literacy rate in Pakistan has barely improved.
In 1998, the last time a census was conducted, 42.7 percent of Pakistanis had received an education. The rate has risen only slightly to an estimated 46 percent today.
Corruption, lack of political will and unmonitored programmes lie at the heart of Pakistan’s failure to implement its grand education plans, experts say.
“Education has never been a national priority,” said Khusro Pervez, director general of the National Commission for Human Development (NCHD), a non-profit group that focuses on education.
Raising school enrolment lies at the forefront of Pakistan’s battle to improve education. The latest plan from Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s government is to enrol six million children between the ages of 5 and 9 years old. The National Plan of Action 2013-2016 has a budget of 188.7 billion rupees ($1.7 billion). It includes incentives to control dropout rates, build new schools, add classrooms and train teachers in existing schools.
Since independence in 1947, Pakistan has seen seven national education policies, eight five-year-plans and about half a dozen other education schemes. Yet the results have been dismal.
“We are good at setting ambitious targets but we are inept at following through in order to achieve the desired results,” said Kaiser Bengali, an education expert from the province of Sindh.
Government after government has abandoned the policies of the previous administration and adopted new and ever loftier targets, wreaking havoc on the education system and squandering millions of dollars, Bengali said. As a result, Pakistan looks unlikely to achieve the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goal of primary education for all children by 2015.
“We are a long way from achieving a 100 percent enrolment,” Bengali said.
CORRUPTION
Pakistan’s education system is rife with corruption. The Supreme Court in 2011 barred the government from closing down a community school after it heard of thousands of “ghost schools” – education buildings left empty or used as stables, police stations or for anything but teaching. The same year, the Supreme Court heard the case of 66 billion rupees levied in a special education tax between 1985 to 1995 but never used for schools.
In 2013, Transparency International found in its Global Corruption Barometer that 43 percent of Pakistanis surveyed saw the education system as corrupt or highly corrupt. More than 15,000 government schools in Pakistan suffer from quality problems and rampant corruption, it said.
“Unfortunately no mechanism exists to assess the performance and outcome of projects,” said Asif Khan, former programme coordinator for universal primary education at National Commission for Human Development. Khan, who has worked on various literacy projects in Pakistan’s restive northern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, said the lack of continuity in education programmes is a major problem.
The NCHD, for example, has raised literacy rates by 2 percent in a decade of work to improve education and has partnered with the government to raise school enrolment levels. However, the group has had to shut operations in places where it achieved a 60 percent literacy rate due to budget constraints.
Mosharraf Zaidi, director of the non-government alliance for education reform Alif Ailaan, said that getting every child into the classroom might be difficult, but not impossible provided that the government honours its pledge to double the education budget and keep its eyes glued to its target. But organisation and strategy are challenges, he added.
According to a report by Alif Ailaan, Pakistan’s federal education budget for the fiscal year 2012-2013 is 504 billion rupees ($4.7 billion). While that is 17 percent higher than last year, it represents only 8 percent of the entire budget and scarcely 1 percent of Pakistan’s national output.
A United Nations Development Programme human development report cites Pakistan’s expenditure on social sectors including education as lower than neighbouring Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka and below levels in some of the poorest African countries, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, which spends 6.2 percent of its GDP on education.
Azam Khan is a reporter based in Islamabad for the Express Tribune who contributes freelance work to Thomson Reuters Foundation.
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