Reversing Failure

Inability to reverse these failures will not only limit Pakistan’s economic growth but carries the potential of rupturing the very fabric of society though polarisation and unrest.

While there is very little hard evidence for education having contributed directly to terrorism in Pakistan, anecdotal evidence combined with profiles of most actors involved in terrorist attacks does suggest a linkage. Indeed, it would be naive to believe an absence of any correlation. The mechanisms through which this connection would be playing out are aptly described by Winthrop and Graff (2010) as:

1. Poor education causing grievances for those left out.
2. Education creating narrow world views.
3. Education failing to instil civic citizenship.
4. The context providing opportunities for militant recruitment.

Future challenges in terms of reversing the identified failures in education are likely to be even more daunting than in the past. A major reason is the severe demographic pressure. Pakistan possesses one of the largest youth bulges in the world. Over sixty-five million are between ages zero and fourteen and are thus either currently at school or will enter school life in the coming decade.

Furthermore Pakistan is only half way through its demographic transition and the current rate of 3.8 births per female is set to carry Pakistan’s youth bulge well beyond 2025. This implies an extremely large cohort whose educational needs will have to be met if Pakistan is to extract positive demographic dividends. According to Mahmood (2009), barring accelerated improvement Pakistan confronts a situation where 28.2 million of its citizens will be out of school in the year 2030.

The economic signs are not encouraging for the short to medium term either. Pakistan will have an additional four million employable youth by 2030 taking the total number to twenty-one million. The stock of unemployed youth will have reached six million in 2030 unless unemployment is kept below 4% which is virtually impossible in the near term according to official estimates. The increased pace of urbanisation adds to the conundrum as expectant youth will move to the cities to find livelihoods, only to be frustrated by the modest absorptive capacity of Pakistani towns. The literature on the subject suggests that such a development encourages urban youth radicalisation.

Pakistan faces a monumental task in halting and then reversing the decline in the education sector.

Stage 1: Correcting the failure to provide.

The ultimate goal for policymakers is to provide a level playing field for students irrespective of their caste, creed, location, family’s economic capacity and religion. Not only must access to education improve, but it must be spread evenly across the entire citizenry.

This will be challenging as Pakistan’s present youth development statistics suggest high disparity across socio-economic strata, schooling systems, and physical location. All future policies must remain cognizant of the explosive ramifications of neglecting underprivileged citizens in peripheral areas.

Financial outlays for education must increase significantly in the coming years. Successive governments have committed themselves to increasing spending on education but progress has been slower than planned. No matter how politically challenging, education’s share as a proportion of GDP must be enhanced to at least the developing country average in the immediate term. In addition, conscious effort must be undertaken to ensure a better balance on spending between administrative and development expenditures within the sector.

Better governance and transparency are buzzwords repeated ad nauseam in discussions of institutional reform. The challenge is great and lacks an immediate solution. But there is no alternative to generating the political will and capacity for better management of the education sector and ensuring that educational allocations are made efficiently. Institutional duplication and organisational inefficiencies need to be addressed across the 275board. As a start, the ambiguities about the different roles of the Federal and Provincial governments in education need to be mapped and clarified.

Policy continuity is also essential.

As a complementary policy strand, there is need for greater empowerment of those with a direct stake in education. The idea of establishing functional School Management Committees (SMCs) is correct provided they are given the needed authority and independence to ensure that schools function, teachers are present, and students attend regularly. The SMCs now in place are largely ineffectual. Given that dropout and completion rates are significantly correlated to poverty, reduction in tuition fees in public schools and increased allotment of need-based scholarships and free textbooks and uniforms should be encouraged. The Punjab government undertook such a program with mixed results. While the program was subsequently rolled back, its experience can be studied and improved upon as a similar initiative is launched across Pakistan.

Conditional cash transfer programs have increasingly become popular and shown to raise school enrolment and retention in a number of countries such as Mexico, Colombia, Nicaragua and Brazil. Pakistan has introduced a few demand size incentives such as involving communities in social service delivery but the explicit use of cash transfers to ensure higher school attendance is largely missing. Moreover, the programs that do involve communities are small relative to the size of the problem, focus on particular provinces, are not integrated, and their targeting and administration is weak. International best practices could be used to improve Pakistan’s efforts in this realm. A positive development in recent years has been the mushrooming of non-elite private schools, especially in Punjab and Sindh. These schools are playing an increasingly significant role in extending educational services particularly in rural areas where the largest growth in private schools is occurring. Further encouragement of private schools along with innovative public-private partnerships where the public sector is found wanting is a desirable policy intervention.

Stage 2: Correcting the failure to deliver quality.

Qualitative improvements in education are bound to lag behind quantitative gains but 276efforts must strive to keep this gap as narrow a possible. The key lies in transforming the public school system and ensuring its uplift so that it can match its elite counterpart. Areas that need attention include the development of new teaching methods that promote creative thinking, qualitative benchmarks for student learning, and standards for teacher recruitment, among others. The concrete steps required are well understood and rehearsed. The political will to implement them is often lacking and needs to be evolved.

Largely at the behest of donors, Pakistan has paid substantial attention to teacher professional development. The effort should be reinforced from within. A step in the right direction has been made with the establishment of the National Professional Standards for Teachers in Pakistan. Efforts must be made to ensure the quality of teacher education and implementation of the standards.

In the short run, a stop-gap measure could entail setting up a program to bring in a significant number of foreign teachers or those from Pakistan’s substantial diaspora in the West, especially ones trained to teach English language and basic mathematics and sciences. These teachers could be placed across the various levels of public schooling throughout the country. To complement these efforts, stronger public-private partnerships have to be forged to help overcome some of the capacity constraints in the public sector. The government has initiated programs like ‘adopt a school’ whereby non-government organisations are encouraged to take over management of public schools. There is significant interest but the scope of such efforts is very limited at present. A well-crafted incentive structure needs to be put in place and bureaucratic hurdles removed to encourage more non-government entities to consider adopting schools.

The madrasah education system needs urgent reform to allow it to prepare students for modern economies while retaining their faith based focus. The agenda to transform the existing ones is oft expressed but political constraints and fear of resistance have prevented the government from doing anything significant. A more realistic alternative may be to set up parallel madrasahs run either by the public or private sector that utilises teachers able to offer balanced theological study in combination with teaching modern subjects.

With regard to public sector education syllabi, the emphasis should be on revising textbooks with the aim of reverting to the content used prior to Islamisation during the 1980s. The aim is not secularisation of the curricula— as that would meet resistance from a deeply conservative society. Rather, the aim should be to remove distortions of history and material that engenders extremist mindsets. Moreover, the curricula would benefit from greater emphasis on ‘peace education’ and teaching that instils a strong civic sense.

Finally, the government is encouraging private schools to offer 10 per cent of admissions to needy students from underprivileged backgrounds. This is a step in the right direction and can go a long way in removing the isolation of students among the three systems. The private sector must be urged to rigorously enforce this regulation, which is not the case at present.

Stage 3: Correcting the failure to provide livelihoods.

Pakistan’s principal weakness in economic planning has been an overriding focus on high macroeconomic growth and not the quality or distributional effects of that growth. The model has not been inclusive and it is only recently that pro- poor growth has become part of the mainstream policy discourse. Strong and sustained macroeconomic growth is imperative to increase the size of the national pie. To complement this however, initiatives geared to equitable income distribution need to be taken. This also means providing job opportunities to the educated unemployed, many of whom come from disadvantaged social backgrounds.

The government’s social safety net initiatives will remain central to its ability to providing the disenfranchised the requisite livelihood opportunities. It is encouraging to see an emphasis on employment schemes and small scale business promotion by the present authorities. The allocations for such initiatives should be further increased and the institutional shortcomings that continue to undermine these programs should be corrected. Special efforts should be made to make these schemes transparent, perhaps by giving civil society a formal role in monitoring and accountability.

Vocational training stands out as an obvious avenue to explore in order to improve opportunities for the uneducated or the poorly educated. While there has been significant donor and government attention, there are still just a limited number of vocational training centres in urban areas 278while rural Pakistan lacks these facilities. Even where they exist, they do not seem to have been instituted under any coherent policy framework. Moreover, the quality of training is inadequate.

Presently, there is lack of congruity between the local industries and training available at the institutes. Very little attempt has been initiated to involve the end users in the operation, management, and program delivery as well as to align the course contents to the needs of the industry. The lack of interactions between industries and Technical and Vocational Education Training (TVET) institutes has therefore resulted in the marginalisation of the TVET institutions with employers demonstrating little interest in extending cooperation to the institutions. This is an area where the donor community has relatively greater experience given its success in other countries. It could treat this as a priority by coordinating its efforts to correct the stated shortcomings.

Perhaps the most executable option to ease Pakistan’s labour force burden in the next decade or two is to find adequate opportunities for labour migration abroad. Pakistan has used this safety valve to good effect in the past by sending a large number of its skilled and unskilled labour force across the world. While economic constraints in recipient countries and the ’extremist’ tag attached to Pakistan in global perception has dented the traditional outflow of labour, the international community could help Pakistan in providing fresh avenues for labour absorption. To enhance the prospects, Pakistan’s vocational training could be tailored to the future demand of various countries projected to have a labour shortage. Friendly countries could consider special arrangements to allow inflow of employable Pakistanis.

Education remains central to Pakistan’s recovery. Given the current circumstances, hoping for return to stability without improving education substantially is a misnomer. The challenge confronting Pakistan is a daunting one. The state must begin to see education as a right, not a favour to its people. Even then, the suggested policy measures cannot bring change overnight. The next decade or so ought to be approached as a corrective period during which the essential policies will be put in place. Progress will likely be frustratingly slow but if executed properly these steps will prepare the ground for more accelerated and visible improvement in the decade that follows. Should this effort be made, the Pakistan of 2030 has every prospect of being more and better educated, 279with its society empowered by a better sense of civic responsibility—a country able to provide job opportunities to all its citizens. This, in turn, would serve as the essential base on which economic progress and prosperity can be predicated.