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UNESCO’s latest report on Education for All labels Pakistanis as one of the most illiterate people on the planet. With 5.5 million school-aged children not in school and child malnutrition being a chronic problem, Pakistan’s development statistics resemble those of the starving nations in Africa. And whereas African countries are fast improving the welfare of their citizens and the state of their economies, the opposite is true for Pakistan.
The elite and the middle classes in Pakistan are aware of the sorry state of affairs in the country. But do they care? An army of illiterate youth is being raised in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa alone. Millions of malnourished children are struggling with hunger in Sindh. Thousands of Balochs are displaced and their children lack access to education. The elite in Pakistan are, however, focused on cricket. It doesn’t matter how educated or empowered one is, apathy runs deep in the society.
UNESCO’s Education for All Global Monitoring Report (Teaching and Learning: Achieving Quality for All) was released recently. The report makes dozens of embarrassing references to Pakistan, highlighting the nation’s failures in educating its children. Even the future does not look promising. Of the 12 countries least likely to meet the threshold for primary education by 2015, 10 are in sub-Saharan Africa. Pakistan and Djibouti are the other two states most likely to fail the primary education test. But this is not all. Pakistan is doing precious little to address this. The gaps in primary education remain. In fact, the UNESCO report points out that of the 10 countries that face the most severe shortage of primary school teachers, all except Pakistan are in sub-Saharan Africa.
What matters more: Education or Cricket?
With the Prime Minister, superior courts, news media, and public intellectuals fixated on sports, no wonder education fails to be a priority in Pakistan, which accounts for 10 per cent of the global population of out of school children. Pakistan spent 2.3 per cent of its GNP on education in 2010, less than 2.6 per cent of GNP in 1999. In comparison, the military spending consumes 3 per cent of Pakistan’s GDP. Who in Pakistan decides to spend more on military and less on education?
It’s not just spending, but smart spending that matters. Historically, education investments have mainly focused on brick and mortar. The chronic shortage of primary school teachers is an example of misspending in education. As for the education spending on non-salary items is concerned, the situation is even worse. A study of recurring budgets in five districts revealed that a mere 5 per cent of the recurring budget was spent on non-salary items.
For decades, Pakistan has relied on charity from tax payers in North America and Europe to pay for the education of its children. Unlike cricket and nuclear bombs, Pakistanis cannot be engaged in issues that really matter to them. With 768,000 Pakistanis paying income tax, the tax to GDP ratio in Pakistan is approximated at 10 per cent. The UNESCO report recommends that Pakistan should consider eliminating tax exemptions to raise the tax revenue. The report highlights the fact that while the agriculture sector accounts for 22 per cent of Pakistan’s economy, it generates only 1.2 per cent of the tax revenue.
The UNESCO report suggests that if tax revenue is increased from being 10 per cent of the GDP to 14 per cent by 2015, and that 20 per cent of the budget is spent on education, Pakistan can raise sufficient funds to teach its own children and adolescents. But wait a second. Why should that be a priority in a country where the government, economic planners, and the civil society have been hooked on large sums of foreign aid, most of it supplied by the country Pakistanis love to hate, but never say no to aid dollars?
Pakistan should not rely on the United States and others to educate its children. And given that the US is increasingly becoming disinterested in the region, it is less likely to doll out large amounts in development aid. The report highlights that of the decline in the American “total aid to basic education between 2010 and2011, 94 per cent is accounted for by large falls in its spending in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.”
It is sad to see that the global population of illiterates is concentrated in South Asia and China. Only 10 countries account for 72 per cent of the global illiterate adults. India, China, Pakistan, and Bangladesh respectively have the highest illiterate populations in the world. If there is one reason for regional collaboration, illiteracy is the one. Why can’t the governments in the four neighbouring countries come up with a joint strategy to deal with the shared challenge?
The difference between rich and poor, Balochistan and Punjab
The curriculum and the quality of education differs between the rich and poor in Pakistan. Standard testing has revealed that for profit, private schools are in fact providing better education in Pakistan than the State-operated schools, which charge significantly less than the private schools. But even the private schools are not meeting the expected quality standards. According to analysis by the Annual State of Education Report team in Pakistan, “Thirty-six per cent of grade 5 students in private schools could not read a sentence in English, which they should have been able to do by grade 2.” Literacy in regional languages was no better. Ninety-plus per cent of children tested in their native Pushto could not read a sentence in Grade 2.
Even for literacy at the primary level, the poor are running 30 years behind the rich in Pakistan. The UNESCO report reveals that whereas children from the affluent households will meet the primary education targets by 2020 (should have been 2014 or sooner), those from the low-income households would reach this benchmark only by the 2050s for boys and may be by the end of the century for girls. With such damming forecasts about their future, Pakistanis should not give a hoot about what the International Cricket Council is contemplating.
The inequality between the rich and the poor is further exacerbated by the differences among provinces. Such is the case of inequalities in Pakistan that the rich in the development deprived Sindh (mostly rural) fare worse in education than the poor in Punjab, which is the demographic base of Pakistan’s armed forces. The percentage of 11-years old from low-income households in Punjab who can do a two digit subtraction is higher than the same cohorts belonging to affluent households in Sindh.
“In Balochistan province, Pakistan, only 45 per cent of children of grade 5 age could solve a two-digit subtraction, compared with 73 per cent in the wealthier Punjab province. Only around one-quarter of girls from poor households in Balochistan achieved basic numeracy skills …,” the report noted.
Lessons from Vietnam
And while Pakistan has been wasting time and opportunity, Vietnam, a country with similar socio-economics, invested in education and have now outperformed Pakistan in literacy and economic growth. It was not very long ago that Vietnam lagged behind Pakistan in development statistics. However, by making education a priority, Vietnamese have changed the course for better. Even more important is the fact that Vietnam focused on eliminating inequalities in education attainment that resulted in a more inclusive economic growth.
The UNESCO report notes that the difference in education inequality between Pakistan and Vietnam “accounts for 60 per cent of the difference in their per capita growth between 2005 and 2010.” Pakistan had twice the level of education inequality than Vietnam. “Viet Nam’s per capita income, which was around 40 per cent below Pakistan’s in the 1990s, not only caught up with Pakistan’s but was 20 per cent higher by 2010.”
Make no mistake. The elite and middle class in Pakistan will not be able to continue to enjoy the perks even in the relative safety of their gated communities. If the poor continue to be marginalised for education and nutrition, the resulting chaos will be far worse than what one finds in today’s Pakistan. The least one can expect from the political and intellectual elite of Pakistan is to focus on what threatens the welfare of citizens. It’s not cricket. It’s illiteracy and malnutrition. If the elite can’t get this right, their education has been all for naught.
Murtaza Haider is a professor of Real Estate Management at Ryerson University and a Director of Regionomics Inc. He is also a syndicated columnist with Post Media and writes a weekly column on urban economics in Canada. He is the author of the book Getting Started with Data Science: Making Sense of Data with Analytics.
