26 December 2004	Sunday	13 Ziqa'ad 1425

ISLAMABAD, Dec 25: The Ministry of Education is establishing the National Education Management and Information System (Nemis) to collect and consolidate accurate literacy data, official sources told Dawn.

The initiative has been taken in the backdrop of little weightage accorded to the country's statistics on education by the international donor agencies, they said.

So far, the government has been depending on the Statistics Division's data, which is also quoted in the annual Economic Survey of Pakistan.

It is worth mentioning here that every now and then, the government has been criticized for using decades-old mechanism to collect data on various sectors such as health and education for policy-making.

The education ministry is the latest addition to public sector organizations, whose statistics have been questioned at the international level.

The ministry sources told Dawn that only recently, the federal education minister, Lt-Gen (retired) Javed Ashraf Qazi, was questioned by a number of international donor agencies about the correctness of data on education.

Since major chunk of investment in the education sector flows in from international donor agencies, the ministry has no other option but to put its house in order as far as its statistics are concerned, they said.

In the current year, the government claims that it has achieved 54 per cent literacy rate, which is being questioned both inside and outside the country.

Hence, the education minister has decided to set up Nemis at the ministry with a view to gathering the most accurate information about the education sector, the sources said.

In this regard, they said, Unesco had agreed to provide funding through the European Union to conduct fresh surveys to collect latest statistics.

They said sophisticated equipment would be utilized in setting up Nemis following the minister's directives. Similarly, the staff for the new system would be recruited on contract basis, they added.