Pakistan may fail to achieve MDGs and EFA targets

EDUCATION is essential pre-requisite and basic building block for social capital formation and human development.
Pakistan like many other developing countries is facing myriad challenges for improving access, equity and quality of education. The country has a population of 160 million people, 33 percent mired in abject poverty, living below the poverty line. The overall literacy rate is 54% whereas it is 36% for females. There are 6.5m children out of school and 80pc of them have never been enrolled in a school, according to provincial reports on grade retention and transition patterns of children and school education, 1995-96 to 2004-05. Of them, 77% of the enrolled children drop out while climbing the ladder and reaching X grade.
The country currently has an enviable annual growth rate of almost 6% but has the most unenviable profiles of human development. Pakistan is at serious risk of not attaining the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Education For All (EFA) targets by 2015. The Gender Parity Index (GDI) of Pakistan (0.73) is one of the lowest in the world. Pakistan is one of those countries where distance to school is a greater deterrent to schooling for girls than for boys. Keeping in view one of the lowest Human Development Index (HDI) indicators, there is an urgent need to have a system of affordable quality education, socially acceptable to all stakeholders. The govt alone will not be able to accomplish the gigantic task of attaining the goal of sustainable quality education and meet the targets of MDGs and EFA.
Viewing its limitation, the govt has involved non-state providers for extending access, equity and quality. The idea is to ensure trust-based synergy and synchronization culminating in win-win situation. With serious resource and institutional constraints, there are slim chances of improvement in public schools. Even though, a large number of non-state providers are quite active in providing education to people, there is still a wide deep chasm between demand and supply. As a consequence, the private sector educational network has expanded at an unprecedented galloping pace in the country. In 1999, there were 36,096 educational institutions in private sector and the number soared to 76,047 in 2005, showing an annual average increase of 25 percent. The expenditure in private sector institutions during 2004-05 was Rs.35.91 billion which is three times higher as compared to last census of private educational institutions conducted in 2001. The ratio of public and private schools in Pakistan is 164579 (67%) and 81103 (33%), whereas it is 66770 (58%) and 48541 (42%) respectively, in the largest province of Punjab. If the current pattern of growth continues, the expenditure on education in private sector will exceed the total expenditure in public sector in the next few years.