State of children report: Govt schools need urgent improvement

 

ISLAMABAD: A civil society organisation on Tuesday said there was an urgent need to improve government schools across the country so that a maximum number of children can get quality education instead of joining the army of unskilled labour force as they grow up.

“Most of the government officials claim that the quality of education in the government schools is up to the standard,” said Anis Gilani of the Society for Protection of the Rights of the Child (Sparc).

“But if you take a look, you will find their own children studying in private schools.”

He said even NGOs were not looking at things in a broader perspective as most of them only took up the project of improving 1-2 schools and that too as long as the donors sponsored them.

Mr Gilani was speaking at the launch of Sparc’s annual report ‘The state of Pakistan’s children 2012.”

In the education sector, the report said Pakistan ranked second with the most out-of-school children in the world.

According to the EFA Global Monitoring Report 2012, approximately one fourth of the 19.75 million children in Pakistan aged 5-9 were out of school. The country reduced its spending on education from 2.6 per cent to 2.3 per cent of the GNP over the decade and ranked 113 among 120 countries on the Education Development Index.

Among the provinces, Sindh allocated the highest amount - Rs111.9 billion - to the education sector. It was also the only province to pass legislation for free and compulsory education under Article 25-A of the Constitution.

The report said though education was made free and compulsory in Balochistan, the act still needed to be notified by the incoming provincial assembly.

Punjab has the highest NER (Net Enrolment Rate) for children in primary schools - 61 per cent - followed by Sindh 53 per cent, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa 51 per cent and Balochistan 47 per cent.

Pakistan has the net enrolment ratio (NER) of 74.l per cent for all the age groups enrolled either in primary, secondary or higher education.Progress has been slowest in low income countries, especially Pakistan, where only 15 per cent of children received pre-primary education in 2010. Pakistan has the lowest youth literacy rate - 70.7 per cent. Only 61 per cent of women in the country are literate compared to 79 per cent of males in the age group of 15-24 years.

The report recommended that budgetary allocations for education should be consistently and substantially increased each year to meet the target of seven per cent of the GDP by 2015 as committed in the National Education Policy 2009.

It was suggested that more technical and vocational institutes should be established to increase the capabilities of the disadvantaged children who had either dropped out or never attended school.

Presenting a report on child labour, Hamza Hassan, a researcher, said successive governments in Pakistan had failed to conduct a specialised child labour survey.

“The first and only national survey undertaken so far estimated that there were 3.3 million child labourers in Pakistan in 1996.”

He said the picture was not clear due to the absence of an updated national survey on underage employment. Various international organisations have come up with different statistics about the prevalence of child labour in the country.

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates that the number of child labourers in Pakistan exceeded 12 million in 2012 while Unicef puts the number at 10 million.

The report said employment of children in the domestic sector remained one of the most exploitative and invisible forms of child labour. The country is yet to sign and ratify ILO’s Domestic Workers Convention. It was recommended that initiatives like the minimum wage policy and child labour-free model districts should be expanded and implemented effectively to provide relief to the child labourers.

In reply to questions, Sparc officials said there was a difference between child labourer and child worker. Those learning skills like auto-mechanic etc., fall in the category of child worker.

“But still if that master auto-mechanic is a literate person, it is more beneficial for him compared to a totally uneducated mechanic,” said Zohair Waheed, one of the researchers. Mr Anis Gilani added that eradicating poverty would never finish child labour. However, abolishing child labour will eliminate poverty in the country.

To prevent violence against children, Maheen Shaiq, the research officer of the NGO, said there was an urgent need to pass all the pending legislation on child protection, including Prohibition of Corporal Punishment Bill 2013, the Criminal Law Amendment Bill 2013 and the Child Marriage Restraint (Amendment) Act 2009.