‘NCHD focusing on children neither enrolled nor belonging to adult literacy’

Islamabad: The National Commission for Human Development is focusing on 6.4 million children from the 10-14 age bracket who were neither admitted to the primary school nor belongs to adult literacy. If ignored, they will fall in the pool of illiterate people and thus, resulting in lower literacy rate of the country. This issue is being addressed in our new PC-1. There is a need for collective and collaborative efforts by policymakers, donors and stakeholders to support in addressing the issue.

This was stated by NCHD Chairperson Razina Alam Khan during a meeting here on Tuesday. The NCHD chairperson said education was the basic and prime requirement of an individual, main ingredient of life, fertilizer for empowerment and imperative factor for development in the digital world of today.

"Now, literacy does not just mean reading and writing rather need is to navigate with the increasingly digitally- mediated societies. We will have to explore and strategize effective literacy policies and programmes that enforce the opportunities being provided by the digital world of today," he said.

The NCHD chairperson said the commission and ARC were launching a campaign to enrol the maximum number of out of school children and increase enrolment rate of the country. "It is a matter of satisfaction that we recently launched the National Training Institute, which works like a laboratory tackling issues related to non-formal education and literacy,” she said.

"Its experts are core professionals in their field and are responsible to develop syllabus, learning and teaching material for learners, build capacities and develop programme manuals and training material required in workshops in light of the research work conducted by these experts and research studies are also conducted in order to find out solution to the grey areas," she added.

The NCHD chairperson said the institute was also developing a National Plan of Action (2018-2025), which would serve as a road map/policy paper to achieve target of SDG-4 and Vision 2025.

She also said there were 6,000 functional literacy centres all over Pakistan running successfully, while 150,000 adults were acquiring literacy and vocational skills. Razina Alam said 5,949 feeder schools with an enrolment of 355,000 along with 100 madrasa schools were also operational in all the provinces of Pakistan, Fata, AJK, Gilgit-Baltistan and Islamabad Capital Territory.

"In collaboration with JICA, we launched a model of non-formal school system where 20 schools are functional in order to provide education to the children of age 10-14 who could neither be admitted to the primary school and nor belongs to adult literacy," she informed.