ISLAMABAD - Educationists and experts have stressed on rehabilitating and rebuilding the education infrastructure destroyed in the recent floods to minimize the learning losses.
They were addressing during a cross-sectoral virtual conversation on “Defending Education Against Climate Change”, organized by the STEAM Policy Unit of Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training here Friday.
Strong public-private partnership models, development and implementation of a comprehensive remedial and accelerated learning program, and international commitment to rebuild the destroyed educational infrastructure on war footing were some of the solutions put forward by the experts to ensure nimble access to education for the displaced children.
“From our conversations with the Punjab Education Department, we came to know that it takes around Rs. 12 million to rebuild one school. This means we need a whopping Rs. 216 billion to rebuild 18,000 schools destroyed in the recent floods.” This sobering reality was shared by senior education expert and author of ‘Teachers, Bureaucracy and Politicians’, Javed Ahmed Malik. Focusing on the infrastructural damages and the looming specter of learning losses, international Education Activist, Moiz Hussain shared, “From the initial reports, over 3.5 million children have been affected by the floods. The biggest challenge we faced during the Covid-19 pandemic was the learning losses due to prolonged school closures.”
