Need to close gender gaps in education

As part of the Education For All (EFA) week by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) that began on Monday, aid workers have urged Islamabad to close gender gaps in its educational system by encouraging girls' and women's education. Only about half of the country’s 140 million people are literate. “We have to help them catch up,” UNESCO’s director, Ingeborg Breines, told IRIN in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. The theme for the education week this year is: “All for Girls’ Education", in line with the major goals of the Dakar framework of action that aims to eliminate gender disparities in education by 2005. Launched in 1990, the EFA movement aims to universalise primary education by 2015, and bridge the gender gap by that time together with a 50 percent improvement in adult literacy. With literacy broadly defined as those who can read and write, statistics for the country also include millions of Pakistanis who can only recite the Islamic holy book in Arabic or simply write their name. If these functionally illiterate people are included, only 61 percent of the country’s male population can be classified as literate. Female literacy levels are worse still, at an abysmal 36 percent - with only 15 percent of rural women receiving education, compared to 55 percent of women in urban areas. Gaps also exist among the four provinces with the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and the southwestern Balochistan provinces bordering Afghanistan, having less than 35 percent literacy levels. Breines maintained that a major literacy campaign was required to achieve EFA goals in the county. Such an undertaking would need huge resources. “There is a need for four percent of the GDP [gross domestic product] to be spent on education,” she said. But state funding for education has remained stagnant at two percent of the GDP over the past decade. Khurram Badar, a deputy director of education with the National Commission on Human Development (NCHD), told IRIN that focusing on women might not produce the desired results. “If we want to improve the literacy conditions in Pakistan we should be looking at 100 percent of the population. This includes the males and females as well,” he said. He maintained that NCHD was looking into two areas. “One is universal primary education, so we can stop the further increase in the number of illiterate people in education,” he said, adding that NCHD was also preparing to launch a massive adult literacy movement country-wide. “Our focus is on prevention and correction at the same time,” he explained. In a major new programme the organisation wants to extend its education projects into all 95 districts of the country. The projects have achieved substantial results in Mardan, a rural district of NWFP where thousands of poor children have a chance at education again. Badar maintained that lack of resources was not the major hurdle. “We should be making best use of the available resources,” he said, adding that the greatest challenge to achieving universal education in the country was capacity building within educational institutions.