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| Health, education allocations far less than targets of MDG |
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Monday, June 15, 2009
Saadia Khalid
Islamabad
In the newly announced budget only 2.3 per cent of the GDP has been allocated to the education sector, which is far less than the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and demands an increased public expenditure on education to 4 per cent of GDP by 2015.
On the other hand only 0.7 per cent of the GDP has been allocated for the health sector despite the fact MDGs require that the public health expenditure must be raised up to 2 per cent of the GDP by the year 2015.
Like the previous years, there had not been a single noteworthy project in education and health announced in the budget 2009-10 where Pakistan seems far lagging behind the MDGs set by the United Nations (UN).
Pakistan is lagging behind in its goal of achieving Universal Primary Education where the net primary enrolment ratio and literacy rate is far less than what has been prescribed in the MDGs.
Similarly, the performance in majority of health sectors is not satisfactory. There had been poor performance in reduction of child mortality rate including mortality rate among children less than five years and infant mortality rate.
Poor performance also observed in maternal health as far as MDGs are concerned where Pakistan is lagging behind in the areas including the proportion of births attended by the skilled birth attendants, contraceptive prevalence rate, total fertility rate and proportion of women 15-49 years who had given birth during last 3 years and made at least one antenatal care consultation.
Talking to media persons Finance Advisor Shaukat Tareen said that they were allocating 3 per cent of the GDP on health and education sector. “An allocation of 2.3 per cent of the GDP had been made for the education sector, while 0.7 per cent had been allocated for the health sector,” he said.
Tareen said that they were aware of the fact that spending 3 per cent of the GDP on the important sectors like health and education was not enough. “We would try to double the budget of education and health in next four to five years while raising its allocation up to 5 per cent of the GDP for each sector,” he said.
The current allocation in education sector does not allow achieving the other set MDGs, which includes the universal enrolment at primary level and completion of education for a minimum of ten years with gender and regional parity; and raising enrolment at tertiary level of education.
The MDGs asked to generate an educational environment, which encourages the thinking process while also stresses the need for the teachers to be the centre of educational reforms, removing teacher shortages, enhancing their salaries, status, along with pedagogical skills.
Establishing standardised curriculum and standardised examination system under state responsibility, provision of research-based education having institutional linkages with industry and workplace, is one of the major goals.
The MDGs asked for the greater investment in skill generation during and after 10 years of schooling and social reforms and incentives to draw in women while also called for the upgradation of at least 10 top universities of Pakistan to enable them to become external campuses of leading world universities and to be able to offer foreign degrees from here.
One of the goals is to ensure relevance of curricula and educational practices to meet the needs of the society and the market.
Formulation and effective implementation of a comprehensive education and training policies and strategies are key to change. Besides, science and technology there needs to be an equal focus on the social sciences, the humanities, and the arts, which provide the human face to science and technology.
The MDGs in health sector asked for the reducing burden on tertiary health care system and overcoming inadequacies in the primary and secondary health care services while overcoming professional, managerial and delivery deficiencies in the district health system.
Fostering health education and preventive measures to avoid disease comprise one of the MDGs besides the High Burden of Disease (BOD), including both communicable and non-communicable diseases.
Despite having one of the oldest family planning programmes in the region, the country’s total fertility rate (TFR) remains a high 4.1 children per woman and the contraception prevalence rate (CPR) as low as 30 per cent.
The overall progress on the MDGs indicators suggests that education and health never remained, as the top priority of any government and there was a dire need to increase the budget in the respective sectors in order to meet the MDGs, which would ultimately lead to the prosperity of the country.
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ISSN 1563-9479 
