ALBER dropped out of Grade 8 about six years ago. His family circumstances were such that he could not have continued in school. He had to get a job, as a helper at a photocopying shop, to be able to contribute to the family income. He found himself without work three years later when the shop closed down. He has been out of a job since then.

Alber wants to go back to school and continue studying until he completes his Intermediate. But he does not have any opportunity to do so. With no job, little money at home and almost no support from any other source, he does not see how he can re-enter the education stream.

Alber has tried to enrol in vocational training programmes provided by the government. It has not worked so far. He was not accepted in some of the programmes as he had not passed his middle school examinations when he was forced to leave. He felt that many of the courses he could get into did not offer good job prospects so he decided not to spend his time, money and energy in acquiring non-marketable skills.

Where should Alber go? What can he do? It seems that, like millions of youth in the country, Alber’s only choice is to continue looking for jobs in the informal sector of the economy and spend his working life there. If he is lucky he will be able to find some stability of job and income. If he is not, he will end up with the millions of unemployed and frustrated people that Pakistan has been producing for quite sometime.

Many among our youth who have dropped out of school want a second chance at education later in life.

Millions of children in Pakistan, even today, never see the inside of a school. But equally, if not more tragically, of the ones who enrol in Grade 1, millions drop out of school before they reach matriculation level. Out of 100 children who enrol in the first grade, it is estimated that only four to six children reach institutions of higher learning.

Many among our youth who have dropped out of school, for whatever reason, want a second chance at education later in life. Data from one youth survey shows that more than 60 per cent of young people who had dropped out of school before reaching the level they aspired to wanted another chance to get educated. Given our population base, this means millions of young people.

Where we have been making efforts at increasing enrolment rates through various reform efforts in the education sector, we have not yet concentrated deeply on the issue of children who have dropped out of schools and now want to re-enter the education space. There are a few non-formal education models that allow children to come back, but these programmes are very small and do not have substantial government support.

What should a 15-year-old who dropped out of Grade 4 a few years back do now? Should he or she try to enrol in a regular school and interact with students who are 10 years old? Most schools will not allow that. But even if they did, this would not be the solution to the problem. It will create disruptions in regular classes and will not be good for the child either. More importantly, if the child could come to a regular school, he or she might not have dropped out in the first place.

Zaheer is a peon in an academic institution, Bashir works in a motorcycle repair shop, John is currently unemployed and looking for a job, Amna volunteers as a teacher’s assistant in a low-fee private school, and Latif makes and serves tea in an NGO office. All of them are young, energetic and intelligent. All of them had to leave off studying. All of them want to go back. None of them sees a way of being able to do that. Becoming private candidates for higher examinations is not a viable option for any of them: they cannot afford the cost of books and coaching lessons, and those who have jobs cannot afford to take time off from their work.

The Punjab government launched the Punjab Education Endowment Fund (PEEF) a few years ago to ensure that students who do well in at the matriculation/intermediate level but do not have the resources to continue their education further get scholarships to continue. PEEF, by most accounts, has been quite successful and has provided scholarships to thousands of deserving students so far.

Could provincial governments come up with a similar programme for youth who are looking for a second chance in life? Instead of spending money distributing laptops or setting up expensive Daanish schools or even giving five chickens to each female student in school (to teach kitchen skills), a support programme that allows second chances to youth could have significant benefits for the millions looking for such opportunities. These opportunities could consist of pathways that allow the youth to complete their education and/or acquire vocational training after attaining some minimum level of education.

One-time errors of omission or even commission should not have consequences that can never be reversed or addressed, especially for young people. Whether circumstances have led to dropping out or it is the young people’s personal choice to do so, if they learn better later, it should be possible for them to find pathways that allow them opportunities to address the deficiencies in their education or vocational training.

But they cannot do this on their own. They need government support to be able to break out of the usually vicious cycles they are caught in: unemployment or poorly paying jobs that have no future prospects leading to low incomes, leading to no opportunities for growth. A major rethink is also needed by our educational and vocational training institutions and programmes to be able to come up with ways that could cater to this category of youth.

The writer is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives and an associate professor of economics at Lums, Lahore.

Published in Dawn, September 9th, 2016