ISLAMABAD, Dec 9: Pakistan’s education sector is marred by corruption, strong gender and regional inequalities and insufficient budget allocations, leading to social imbalances and poor delivery of services in the public sector, according to the Asian Development Bank.

“Pakistan’s education indicators are poor, even within the context of South Asia. Gender and regional inequalities are strong. Unless the performance trajectory changes markedly, Pakistan probably will not achieve the education MDGs (millennium development goals),” said an evaluation report of bank.

The evaluation is based on the ADB’s 38-year operations in Pakistan. During the period, the ADB extended a total of $16.3 billion for more than 180 projects in a number of sectors including education, agriculture, energy, finance, law and economic management and communications sectors.

The bank’s own performance in only two sectors, namely transport and law and economic management, was found to be efficient. In the rest of sectors, the outcome was either partly successful or unsuccessful.

“Although many reasons are given for the weak performance of education sector, insufficient budget allocation and ineffective use of the resources are the main factors. Leakage through corruption is almost certainly an important factor,” said the bank.

“As the public education system has failed to deliver the results parents want, private schools have expanded in response to strong demand,” it said.

In overall terms, the success rate of education sector projects in Pakistan is 29 per cent, although this rate improved to 50 per cent for projects approved in the 1990s.

The ADB’s own assessment put the education sector projects at ‘partly successful’ on a four-category scale of highly successful, successful, partly successful and unsuccessful.

The report said the ADB’s focus on girls’ basic education has been both an advocacy and investment. Given the importance of education, the ADB’s resource allocation to the sector has been relatively modest and the volume of advisory technical assistance has been low. During the entire period of 39 years, the ADB extended around half a billion dollars.

Talking about the need for changed intervention strategy, the reports said it should direct a greater proportion of resources to the education sector with three provisions.

First, the predominant focus on providing access rather than learning outcomes. Second, increased funding needed to be driven by careful consideration of the results being achieved and should be based on more complete understanding of the causal factors of poor performance. Third, the bank needed to increase significantly the resources it directed to support the programme.

The assessment suggested that analytical underpinning of education sector operations has been insufficient, compounded by a lack of accurate information about sector performance and the fact that apparently learning from experience has been too meagre.

Likewise, supervisory operation in areas of service delivery were widely dispersed and relatively inaccessible, and more so in basic education projects.