Education in Pakistan and the Role of NGOs
By Anjum Altaf, PhD
Washington, DC
(Conclusions from the Conference on ‘Education Reform in Pakistan’
San Jose, California – August 30, 2008)
NGOs are doing a remarkable job in changing the life chances of the children in Pakistan they are able to reach. In this perspective their role is to be commended and supported.
What are the other roles that NGOs can perform?
The conference was titled Education Reform in Pakistan. What can be the role of NGOs in the reform of the education system in Pakistan?
The term reform implies that the system is functioning reasonably well and improvements are required at the margin. In this perspective, there is agreement that improvements in content and teaching methods are at the top of the agenda. NGOs are already playing a role in experimenting with more effective teaching methods and more learning-friendly content in their schools.
They can consciously strengthen this function by using their schools as laboratories and by holding joint workshops to discuss and evaluate the innovations. The most important next step would be to then work towards having these innovations adopted in the public school system. This task remains to be done and is one where NGOs can play a greater role by taking on a greater responsibility as the cutting edge of education reform.
Although the conference was titled Education Reform in Pakistan, the moderator prefaced the opening of the conference by placing it in the context of the state of education in Pakistan. The summary from the State Bank of Pakistan’s report highlighted the crisis situation and confirmed that the gap between demand and supply continues to widen. Thus while dropouts from the primary school system totaled 11 million in 2004 the figure was projected to rise to 14 million by 2010.
In this perspective it is obvious that NGOs cannot see themselves as substitute service providers that can hope to fill the gap. The total number of schools run by NGOs is of the order of a few thousand and the total number of students reached of the order of a few hundred thousands. In fact, the number of madrassas filling this gap exceeds the number of schools being opened by NGOs. This portends a bleak outcome for the future.
NGOs have to do the arithmetic and realize that they cannot set this task for themselves. The most effective role in this context is to act as a pressure group to lobby the state to discharge its responsibility to the citizens.
However, it is also clear that education is a right that has to be won – there will be no supply without effective demand. Therefore, NGOs also need to act as consciousness raising groups to mobilize excluded citizens around their basic right to a good education.
In this context both the state and international donors claim to have invested a very large amount of funds in education in Pakistan. This effort has been very high in visibility but very low in impact. This identifies another role for NGOs – to act as watchdog groups on behalf of citizens to ask for greater accountability. Collaboration with the media to investigate into the outcomes of specific projects would generate the pressure to improve delivery.
An international coalition of NGOs (excluding donors) is the best next step in this situation. The objectives of the coalition should be to raise the consciousness of citizens regarding their right to a good education, to experiment with new content and teaching methods in their own schools, to exert pressure on the state to deliver more and better education based on these innovations, and to institutionalize mechanisms to improve the accountability of funds invested in education by the state and by international donors.
Useful references:
The Subtle Subversion: The State of Curricula and Textbooks in Pakistan, SDPI, Islamabad, 2002. http://www.sdpi.org/whats_new/reporton/State%20of%20Curr&TextBooks.pdf
The South Asian Idea – An e-learning resource for college students in South Asia to promote critical thinking based on contextually relevant content.
http://thesouthasianidea.com
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