'Political consensus essential to address education crisis in Pakistan'

Islamabad, Mar. 19 (ANI): Pakistan will witness no progress until there is political consensus to address the education crisis in the country, according to activists.

There are 12 million school-age children in Pakistan who have never been to school, two-thirds of whom are girls, reports the Christian Science Monitor.

Mosharraf Zaidi, director of Alif Ailaan, a recently-launched campaign focused on improving education in Pakistan, and former adviser to Pakistan's Foreign Ministry said there is a need of across-the-board political consensus to solve Pakistan's education crisis.

Zaidi said that in the past 40 years, there has been a huge expansion of private schools in Pakistan. In the 1970s, barely one percent of schools were private, he said. Today over a third of all children attend private schools, a statistic that reveals the huge appetite for education in Pakistan, he added.

But the quality of education remains low, and there is also a simple shortage of girls' schools, said Anwar Saifullah Khan, president of the ruling Pakistan People's Party in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. In Pakistan, boys and girls generally attend separate schools.

In October last year, 15-year-old Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head and neck by the Taliban while she was returning home from school, for advocating girls' right to education. The incident provoked an outcry in Pakistan and around the globe.

The attack made Malala an international symbol of the many lives claimed by the violent extremism that plagues Pakistan and highlighted the country's education crisis.

In April 2010, a little more than two years before the attack on Malala, Pakistan's main legislative body passed a constitutional amendment making state-funded education a right for all children from the age of 5 to 16. Still, a deeper rethink at the policy level did not follow the amendment, the report said.

Saifullah Khan said that a lack of accountability is the biggest challenge. There are no mechanisms in place to ensure that teachers in state-funded schools turn up each day, he said. This is less of a problem at private schools as it is easier for the parent companies to maintain oversight over their network of schools, but at both private and state schools there are no set standards to which teachers and their students are held. (ANI)