Pakistan neglecting education of its people
Pakistan has a national crisis in education in dire need of a national response. But the responsibility to deal with this rests with provincial authorities after a constitutional amendment that was adopted five years ago.
To urge a national response is not to argue for rollback of the 18th Amendment, a political impossibility. It is to emphasise the need for the federal government headed by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to, a) show leadership on this critical policy front; b) evolve a mechanism, like all good federal systems do, to address key issues nationally; and c) to mobilise consent and coordination from provincial authorities to act urgently on education.
Pakistan has the world's second largest number of children out of school. 25 million children or almost half of children from 5 to 16 years of age do not go to school. Two thirds of them are girls. Among those who attend school, 46% drop out before completing primary education. The net enrolment rate at primary school is 57%, but this falls dramatically to 22% in middle school. Just 50% of girls have ever attended any school. In rural Pakistan only 39% have been to school. All this is an inevitable consequence of the neglect of education over decades and chronic under spending by successive governments on education. At less than 2% of GDP today, this is the lowest in South Asia.
Unless this situation can be reversed Pakistan will, among other challenges, confront a demographic disaster. The country's working age population is expected to double in the next 20 years. Young people are pouring into the job market at a rapid pace, but many lack education or the skills to be gainfully employed. Without expanding the scale and quality of education, these young people will face a jobless and hopeless future. A failed demographic transition will have serious social and economic repercussions for the country.
Against this backdrop of state neglect and deteriorating state schools, the 18th amendment transferred, carte blanche, all the Centre's remaining education functions to provinces, even if jurisdiction over running schools and colleges and recruitment and training of teachers had long rested with provincial governments. The immediate and deleterious consequence of this was to enable the federal government to wash its hands off this issue and use the amendment as an alibi to claim it had no responsibility in this area, other than for higher education.
This is at odds with the constitutional obligation set out by the 18th Amendment: the right of every child to education. Article 25A calls on "the state" to "provide free and compulsory education to all children of the age of five to sixteen years".
Other than increase financial allocations for education, the federal government has a role to play on several big picture issues. They include framing a national curriculum, data collection and monitoring for national benchmarking and evolving common standards for the country. There are many alternatives available to the federal government to evolve a national response to Pakistan's education emergency.
Pakistan has a national crisis in education in dire need of a national response. But the responsibility to deal with this rests with provincial authorities after a constitutional amendment that was adopted five years ago.
To urge a national response is not to argue for rollback of the 18th Amendment, a political impossibility. It is to emphasise the need for the federal government headed by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to, a) show leadership on this critical policy front; b) evolve a mechanism, like all good federal systems do, to address key issues nationally; and c) to mobilise consent and coordination from provincial authorities to act urgently on education.
Pakistan has the world's second largest number of children out of school. 25 million children or almost half of children from 5 to 16 years of age do not go to school. Two thirds of them are girls. Among those who attend school, 46% drop out before completing primary education. The net enrolment rate at primary school is 57%, but this falls dramatically to 22% in middle school. Just 50% of girls have ever attended any school. In rural Pakistan only 39% have been to school. All this is an inevitable consequence of the neglect of education over decades and chronic under spending by successive governments on education. At less than 2% of GDP today, this is the lowest in South Asia.
Unless this situation can be reversed Pakistan will, among other challenges, confront a demographic disaster. The country's working age population is expected to double in the next 20 years. Young people are pouring into the job market at a rapid pace, but many lack education or the skills to be gainfully employed. Without expanding the scale and quality of education, these young people will face a jobless and hopeless future. A failed demographic transition will have serious social and economic repercussions for the country.
Against this backdrop of state neglect and deteriorating state schools, the 18th amendment transferred, carte blanche, all the Centre's remaining education functions to provinces, even if jurisdiction over running schools and colleges and recruitment and training of teachers had long rested with provincial governments. The immediate and deleterious consequence of this was to enable the federal government to wash its hands off this issue and use the amendment as an alibi to claim it had no responsibility in this area, other than for higher education.
This is at odds with the constitutional obligation set out by the 18th Amendment: the right of every child to education. Article 25A calls on "the state" to "provide free and compulsory education to all children of the age of five to sixteen years".
Other than increase financial allocations for education, the federal government has a role to play on several big picture issues. They include framing a national curriculum, data collection and monitoring for national benchmarking and evolving common standards for the country. There are many alternatives available to the federal government to evolve a national response to Pakistan's education emergency.
