June 04, 2007	Monday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 18, 1428

ISLAMABAD, June 3: The Strengthening Participatory Organisation (SPO) has launched two discussion papers in the areas of health and education, focusing on policy making and implementation.

The paper titled “Reform in Health care: An Equitable and Comprehensive System” by Dr Syed Furqan Zafar says that policy reforms directed towards restructuring of the country’s health system were unavoidable.

“If the government is committed to improve health status and is intending to attain Millennium Development Goals, policy reforms aimed at provision of effective health care services are essential”, it stressed.

The paper analyses the reforms in the health sector of Pakistan and explains how these polices are formed and implemented.

In a balanced health care system, the state should be the sole guarantor of health for majority of the population and provide services through government-owned facilities or regulate health services for private sector, it said.

The privatisation of health system is no answer to the past mismanagement, rather it is another barrier for the poor population.

Official figures show that 32 per cent of Pakistan’s population has no access to the health care system at all. Privatization will increase there misery due to poor financial position of the masses.

The paper underlines the dire need to establish a National Drug Formulatory in the country, which may function as a body to collect and circulate information about life saving, essential and commonly used drugs with generic version only.

Drug import should be limited to only those drugs that are not being produced locally. There should be state-of-the-art quality control mechanisms to ensure that the drugs produced by both national and multi-national companies are of international quality.

The paper on education titled International Influences on Education Policy-Making by Malick Shahbaz Ahmad Tahir, while covering the intra-state influences and defining the policy in the global context, reflects upon international influences affecting the policy making of states.

The paper explains how international policies are being borrowed and adopted by Pakistan through commitments it makes at conferences and fora of international level.

The paper analyses the National Education Policy and other contemporary education policies, including the Education Sector Reforms, to identify how the policies are being framed in light of international guidelines.

Furthermore, how the international entities including World Bank, Asian Development Bank and bilateral donor agencies are using financial aid and donations to influence the policy making domains in the third world countries including Pakistan.

The paper said administratively, Pakistan had been a centralised country where policy formulation and decision making had been done bureaucratically at the federal level. Therefore, it has been a longstanding argument that the decision makers and the policy formulators have been ignorant of the on-ground realities, causing failures of the policies and poor quality of social services including education.

The paper said the outcomes of the decentralisation in Pakistan had yet to be assessed. It is a recent phenomenon and the fact is that it has not yet been grounded well and is facing difficulties in implementation and power struggle is getting intense at district, state and federal levels.

Nevertheless, due to the international pressures, the government’s commitment and priorities in this connection have been quite clear.

The Education For All (EFA) programme along with the decentralisation policy has created, empowered and provided legal standings to the international organisations to ensure their participation in the policy-making processes.