PESHAWAR: Speakers at a seminar here on Thursday stressed the need for adopting feasible models such as digital literacy, masjid schools and community schools to maximize accessibility to address the issue of out-of-school children and promote education in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
The seminar titled “Mainstreaming the Out-Of-School Children” was jointly organized by the Institute of Regional Studies (IRS) Peshawar and Tanzim-e-Asatiza Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Former Director Institute of Education and Research, University of Peshawar Prof Dr Arbab Khan Afridi presided over the session. Managing Director Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Education Foundation Zariful Maani was the chief guest on the occasion.
The event was also addressed by Chairman IRS Dr Mohammad Iqbal Khalil, Provincial President Tanzim-e-Asatiza Dr Mohammad Nasir, former Principal Government Higher Secondary School Mushtaq Hussain and others.
In his keynote speech, Zariful Maani highlighted serious governance issues and gaps that impede the promotion of education and literacy in the province. He said the major issue in governance was the lack of genuine and credible data. “Everyone has his own data, which leads to the creation of misconceptions and contractor-type people take advantage of the situation,” he added.
He remarked that there were contractors at the international, national and even local levels in the shape of large and small companies as well as individuals who were exploiting the situation through various projects and contracts.
Zariful Maani, who has also served as Special Secretary in the Elementary and Secondary Education Department and managing director of the Elementary and Secondary Education Foundation, questioned the notion of sending every child to school. “This is a real question which no one thinks about - whether we really need to send every child to school. We should assess the economic impact of the passed-out and dropped-out children. In my opinion, the dropped-out people have a much more positive impact on the national economy than those who passed out from schools,” he stressed.
He stressed the need for data-driven, evidence-based policy for the promotion of education and suggested establishing a proper data center to ensure genuine and credible data.One issue highlighted by Zariful Maani was accessibility and the ever-increasing population. He said the population in the province was growing at nearly three percent annually, which was very high. Furthermore, unplanned and scattered settlements along with random and irregular constructions were making accessibility even more difficult, he said.
He explained that in the rest of the world, proper zoning is carried out before the establishment of new settlements and planned expansions are made. Here, however, settlements are established first and then demands for schools, hospitals and other necessities are raised later, he added.
He argued that it was not possible for the government to overcome the issue of accessibility, as the current population would require tens of thousands more schools for which nearly Rs 20,000 billion would be needed. Therefore, the only viable option for the government was to implement informal models of literacy and education. The most feasible was digital literacy, as around 80 percent of the province’s population was using various digital gadgets. Thus, this tool could be more easily utilized for education in an informal manner, he stressed.
Other feasible models like community schools, Masjid schools, and similar alternatives could also be properly utilized, he added.Prof. Arbab Khan Afridi said that enrollment of out-of-school children was a pressing issue, but a more serious concern was retaining the already enrolled students, as the dropout ratio was very alarming, he added.
He gave the example of Sri Lanka, which had overcome the dropout issue by compelling teachers to enroll their own children in the schools where they themselves were teaching. This model, he suggested, should also be properly implemented here.
Other speakers highlighted some basic statistics. They said the total number of out-of-school children in the country was 26 million. Of them, 1.6 million belonged to Punjab, while in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa around 4.9 million children were out of school, including 2.9 million girls and two million boys.