ISLAMABAD: Pakistan lags far behind the Education for All (EFA) goals, says EFA Global Monitoring report launched here on Wednesday.

According to the report, Pakistan is among 18 most low income countries, which were far from achieving EFA as a whole.

Among 18 countries Pakistan is at number 11. Even Bangladesh, Rwanda, Nepal and Sudan are relatively better than Pakistan.

It said that Pakistan has not achieved any of the EFA goals, but made significant progress in closing the gender gap, particularly in the early years after 2000.

When the goals were set, the enrolled girls and boys ratio was 68:100. The girls’ ratio goes up to 83 by 2011 and 87 by 2012.

The report “Education for All 2000-2015: Achievements and Challenges”, produced by Unesco which has tracked progress on these goals for the past 15 years.

The launching ceremony held here, which was attended by State Minister for Federal Education and Professional Training Minister Baleeghur Rehman as chief guest and other education experts.

The report said overall one third of the countries had achieved all of the measurable EEA goals set in 2000.Only half of all countries have achieved the goal of universal primary enrolment.

An extra $22billion a year is needed to achieve the new education targets now being set for the year 2030.

Speaking on the occasion, State Minister Baleegh Ur Rehman said that it was unfortunate that Pakistan was lagging behind the targets due to various reasons and still millions of children were out of schools.

“We are determined to improve our education sector and we have taken a number of initiatives in this regard,” he said and added that the government had prepared a National Plan of Action to accelerate the progress towards educational the goals.

The minister said modalities of Malala fund have been finalised and it would be focusing on gender parity and would initiate projects to enable girls from remote areas to have easy access to quality education.

Speaking in her opening remarks, Baela Raza Jamil, Director Vibeke Jensen, Representative/Director Unesco Islamabad emphasized the need of focusing on what needs to be done urgently to make sure we reach the goals as fast as possible.

She stressed that plans for achieving new goals would need to be set including ensuring of the implementation of government commitment to raise the share for education from 2 per cent to 44 per cent of the GDP. In his presentation, Vibeke Jensen said that in Pakistan between 2006 & 2012, little progress was made in reducing the proportion of the poorest children who has never attended school.

By contrast, among the richest children, little gender disparity existed in either year.

She said pledge had been made at Dakar that “no country should be thwarted in achieving the EFA goals due to lack of resources” has been one of the biggest failures of the EFA period.

“The world has made tremendous progress towards Education for All,” said Unesco Director-General Irina Bokova.

Published in Dawn, April 23rd, 2015

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