Pakistan lagging behind education targets by over half century: UN

Pakistan is 50+ years behind in its primary and 60+ years behind in its secondary education targets, according to the UN Global Education Monitoring Report, 2016.

The world is set to miss by more than half a century a deadline for ensuring all children receive secondary education, the United Nations said on Tuesday, adding that 40 percent of pupils are being taught in a language that is not their mother tongue.

World leaders agreed last year that by 2030 all girls and boys should be able to complete free quality primary and secondary education, but chronic under-funding is holding back progress, a UN report said.

According to the report, in Pakistan, the literacy rate of poor rural males is 64%, compared to 14% for their female counterparts. The 2014 ASER survey found that in rural Pakistan, the proportion of students in grade 6 who could read a grade 2 level story in Urdu, Sindhi or Pashto was 65% while among all children aged 10 (the theoretical grade 6 age) the share was 31%.

Many 10-year-olds had never been to school, had already left (often because of not benefiting from the experience) or were in a lower grade and had not yet developed reading skills. While 89% of grade 10 students could read a very simple text, only 64% of sampled 14-year-olds could do so, a difference of 25 percentage points.

ICT has quickly become essential to daily life and work in most countries. A survey of 32 mostly middle income countries found that, on average in 2014, 38% of households had a computer at home and 44% used the internet at least occasionally (or had a smartphone). The latter measure ranged from 8% in Pakistan. The report also found that in Punjab, 24% of public schools reported that a teacher had left in the previous year, compared with 71% of private ones (Andrabi et al., 2008), which had lower pay and less job protection.

The deadline on universal education was agreed as part of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – an ambitious plan to end poverty, hunger, advance equality and protect the environment.

UNESCO said education was key to every aspect of sustainable development including increased prosperity, better agriculture and health, less violence and greater gender equality. Achieving universal upper secondary education by 2030 in low income countries could lift 60 million people out of poverty by 2050, the report said. Educating mothers to lower secondary education in sub-Saharan Africa by 2030 could also prevent 3.5 million child deaths between 2050-60.

CONFLICT

The report said conflict was one of the greatest obstacles to progress in education, keeping over 36 million children out of school.

Around 263 million children are currently out of school globally, according to the report, and almost 30 percent of children from the poorest households in low income countries have never been to school. Critics of the educational goal believe that pushing for universal upper secondary completion distracts from ensuring at least nine years of basic education for all.