OSLO: Despite facing numerous challenges, Pakistan is giving high priority to education and plans to increase public spending in the sector to 4 per cent of GDP by 2018, said Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on Tuesday.

Speaking at a panel discussion at the Oslo Summit on Education for Development here, Mr Sharif said that in the last decade Pakistan has had to deal with all kinds of economic challenges, including earthquakes, floods, terrorism and displacement of people.

Thousands of schools were wiped out in 2005 because of a massive earthquake, he said. And in 2010, floods destroyed about 9,088 schools and 5,790 school buildings were used as shelters for the affected people.

The country had already spent millions on the reconstruction of schools but billions more were required for the rehabilitation of the displaced people, he said.

Turning to the issue of terrorism, the prime minister said that children and youths caught up in conflicts must not be denied their right to education and said Pakistan continued to provide learning opportunities to the Temporarily Displaced Persons during the recent war against terrorism in tribal areas.

The government was facilitating schooling even in camps meant for refugees and other displaced people, Mr Sharif said. He also referred to the 3.5 million Afghan refugees living in Pakistan and urged the international community to enhance humanitarian funding for education.

He called for imparting what he called purpose-oriented education to children and equipping the youth with technical and vocational skills.

He said that even though education was now a provincial subject in Pakistan, the federal government was acting as an influential catalyst to promote education in all parts of the country.

Other panellists included Malcolm Brown, the deputy minister of Canada for international development; Antonio Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees; Anthony Lake, the executive director of Unicef; and Tove Wang, the secretary general of the Save the Children, Norway.

Published in Dawn, July 8th, 2015

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