May 24, 2003	Saturday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 21,1424

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ISLAMABAD, May 23: Finance Minister Shaukat Aziz has asked the donor agencies to let the local implementation machinery perform in light of ground realities.

Speaking at the concluding session of the Saarc education ministers conference on Friday, the minister said Pakistan had enhanced its social sector spending by 20 per cent for the next year to Rs161 billion.

The minister said the donors’ approach should be based on the local ground realities otherwise aid and spending could not produce end result.

He said Pakistan had achieved the economic turn around and was at a take-off stage. He said the turn around had generated more fiscal space for health, education and human resource. Through it, Pakistan would have the highest growth rate in the Saarc region within a couple of years.

Mr Aziz said that only home-grown economic policies could fight poverty and no country could develop without investing in human resource capital.

He termed it dangerous to see only the allocation of resources for education sector improvement and insisted that it should be assessed by way of its outcome. He said a lot of philanthropic and non-governmental contribution was also essential which was already going on and there was no statistics as to how much the non-governmental sector was contributing. “Look beyond budget and focus on outcomes,” said the minister.

The finance minister said the government viewed the importance of education governance because of several factors including meagre resources for education seek amelioration in more effective and efficient management, moving the decision making process as close to the source of action as possible and the demand for increasing participation in choosing and managing education by the communities and the children.

He said that expertise in areas such as planning, budgeting, personnel development, management, decision making, educational leadership and improvement, change management strategies, information analysis and monitoring and assessment was not evenly spread and was lacking in most of the rural areas.

The lack of expertise, he said, was a serious barrier to the implementation of education devolution reforms. The success of devolving education management at grass roots needed capacity building on sustainable basis coupled with institutionalizing rules and practices that enable the organization to function effectively.

He said the government viewed education as means of enhancing people’s capabilities and widening their choices in order to enjoy the freedom that make life meaningful and worthwhile.