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22.8m out-of-school children to be enrolled

By Our Correspondent
September 13, 2018

Islamabad : With an aim to enhance literacy rate in the country and bring 22.8 million out-of-school children to schools, the Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Trainings has planned to create a special wing.

"The proposed wing will enable the enrolment on top priority basis," Minister for Federal Education and Professional Trainings Shafqat Mehmood told a briefing during a visit to the National Commission for Human Development here on Wednesday.

The minister said that during the last 70 years the education has been neglected by successive governments.

"That is why our literacy rate is one of the lowest in the world i.e. 58% which is not tolerable. Our government’s top priority is to make people literate, so that we achieve a respectable status among the world nations," he said.

The minister deplored that the aristocracy has established its own expensive educational institutions whereas; the poor man has to depend on low quality education in the public sector.

He said public sector institutions will be strengthened and improved as to provide better education facilities to the common man. We don’t want to make people unemployed but want public sector employees to work hard and give positive results.

He said this government will not allow adhocism and we want a cohesive, targeted and uniform work in public sector organizations.

During maiden visit of the minister, the chairperson NCHD Razina Alam Khan briefed him about the Working of NCHD.

She said the commission was running 5,949 feeder schools of Non-formal education all over the country in remote areas where 335,164 children of age 5 to 16 are acquiring education.

"We work with a back-log having Adult Literacy Program, since inception being a lead agency it had imparted literacy skills to 3.96 adults. We recently established a National Training Institute of Non-formal Education which will address the learning needs by developing learning resources for non-formal education, capacitate the human resource for delivery mechanism and to conduct research studies which will be value addition for the project," she said.

Accessibility to education along with quality is the main issue of underdeveloped countries which can be only address through Non-formal Education, which is a cost effective and viable approach, she said.

"The NCHD claims that if 35,000 more non-formal schools are established for a period of 5 years the educational needs of 6.4 million children can be addressed to bring them in the mainstream," she added.

She was of the view that earlier programs and policies related to education lack implementation and seriousness.

Experts of NTI has formulated a National Plan of Action (2018-2023) under Ministry of Federal Education & Professional Training including all the stakeholders i.e. government departments, international donors and NGOs to achieve 100% enrolment and literacy rate in the country.

"This NPA includes annually breakup of all its programs which suggests a viable and effective implementation strategy along with a strong monitoring mechanism for measuring success rate of the project. If this plan is implemented in true spirit, we will be able to address the learning need of 22.6 million OOSCs and 57 million illiterates," she said.