July 28, 2006	Friday	Rajab 1, 1427

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ISLAMABAD, July 27: Pakistan is at serious risk of not attaining the goal of adult literacy by 2015, warns Education for All Global Monitoring Report 2006.

The theme of this year’s report is Literacy for Life.

Unesco Representative Jorge Sequeira, speaking at the launch of the report here on Thursday, said this assertion showed that more concerted efforts were required to achieve the target.

Pakistan having over five million illiterates is one of the countries where global illiteracy is concentrated.

Even more worrysome is that illiteracy in Pakistan increased since 1990 indicating that progress in improving literacy was insufficient to offset the effect of continuing population growth.

Although the number of adult illiterates in South and West Asia declined slightly by 0.3 per cent, still the adult literacy rate in the region (59 per cent) ranks lowest in the world mainly due to the very low levels of adult literacy level in Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Gender Parity Index (GPI): Pakistan has one of the world’s lowest GPIs (0.73); India and Nepal have made much progress since 1998 and nearly reached gender parity in 2002 (India’s GPI increased from 0.84 to 0.96 and Nepal’s from 0.78 to 0.92); Bangladesh, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Maldives and Sri Lanka had already reached parity by 1998.

Family income: Income and the cost of providing education influence family willingness to send girls to school more heavily than they affect the willingness to send daughters to walk long distances or walk alone to school. In addition, the costs of going to school may be higher for girls.

Pakistan is one of those countries where distance to school is a greater deterrent to schooling for girls than for boys; parents may have to pay higher transportation costs. Economic crises affect education systems.

Public finances deteriorate and resources for the public funding of education typically decline. Household incomes fall and resources to meet the private costs of education are less available to families, although not all the effects of economic crisis are to education’s detriment: in particular, the lowering of wages in the labour market can reduce the opportunity cost of children attending school rather than working.

Hence, an economic and financial crisis often encourages school dropout, but not invariably. In Pakistan, severe reductions in income increased dropout from secondary schools and, to a lesser extent, primary schools.

Out of School Kids: Pakistan alongwith India and Bangladesh also have the notoriety of being one of the 19 countries that have more than one million out-of-primary schoolchildren, most of the remaining countries being in sub-Saharan Africa such as Burkina Faso, Mali or the Niger.