NCHD promises education to out of school children

Islamabad: With the help of non-formal education and multi-grade teaching techniques, we will be able to educate the unlettered people in the country and provide education to the children of age group 5-15, who missed the schools. In just 32 months, this programme will enable them to continue their studies from sixth grade in the regular system.

This was observed by National Commission for Human Development (NCHD) Chairperson Razina Alam Khan while addressing the meeting of the commission's senior management here on Tuesday. The meeting was attended by heads of departments and director general Imran Ahmad.

The NCHD chairperson said the commission had launched the first National Training Institute to meet the challenge, where experts were imparting multi-grade and non-formal teaching techniques to the teachers and facilitators of feeder schools.

She said currently, Pakistan’s education statistics showed a challenging situation as the literacy rate was only around 60 per cent, which meant 57 million people couldn't read and write. "The number of out of school children (OOSC) is also 22.6 million, which recently declined but we have to achieve the target set in the Vision 2025 i.e. 90 per cent literacy rate and 100 per cent enrolment rate," she said.

The NCHD chairperson said Pakistan among other countries of the world had signed the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and Goal 4 of SDGs related to quality education and lifelong learning.

She said various levels and dimensions of monitoring frameworks had been defined to better monitor the SDG-4 at national and global levels. “The monitoring system that provides in-depth specifics of education system offers greater opportunities to policy makers for their unique circumstance and development priorities. As Pakistan is unable to achieve the Education for All agenda by 2015, the pounding significance and unfinished business of EFA will be the integral part of new agenda. In this connection significant improvement has been witnessed, but we were lagging behind in capacity building for which NCHD has constituted National Training Institute to resolve the issue,” she said.

She said the government had taken many initiatives for building concrete educational foundation of the country and gave considerable attention to the betterment of education. “It is encouraging to note the decrease in out of school children from 24 million to 22.6 million and adjusted net enrolment rate from 72% to 77% during the last three years along with increase of students in the public sector schools,” she added.

The NCHD chairperson said improvement is witnessed in Pakistan HDI ranking of UN as well, but according to the Global Education Monitoring(GEM) Report of UNESCO Pakistan is among those 6 countries of the world where one third children of school going age, are out of school. We have launched a massive campaign for the enrolment of those OOSCs and had enrolled 45,800 children to feeder schools in this year, she observed.

Learning through accelerated courses is the only way today to cater for 22.6 million Out of School Children and 57 million illiterates; which is a challenging factor for all the stakeholders involved in education, she viewed. The Accelerated Learning modules and condensed syllabus, being prepared by NCHD would provide OOSC a second chance/ opportunity to take part in educational activities.

She said the NCHD had imparted literacy skills to 3.84 million illiterates in the country and 320,000 children are acquiring education in 5,949 Feeder Schools, where 6,581 Facilitators/Teachers are delivering multi-grade teaching to the learners, she added. The NTI will enhance the capacity of present Feeder Teachers in a short time, she maintained.

She stressed the need of further efforts for the improvement of literacy rate in the country, especially in the field of adult literacy and non-formal education. She suggested that all stakeholders play due role for ending illiteracy from the country.