ISLAMABAD: Aitesham may only be eight, but his skill as a mechanic is second only to his ustaad’s. The mischievous youth who fixes motorcycles for a living in the capital’s Sitara Market, in sector G-7, should really be in school.

But despite his keen intelligence and dexterity with a spanner, he is adamant that he does not want to go back. Aitesham stopped going to the nearby Federal Government School No. 4, last year. “I failed the grade four exams and was severely scolded and humiliated by my teacher, Madam Aziz. My family is poor and we needed the money, so I dropped out and came to work at the workshop,” he says, not once looking up from his work.

He receives Rs70 every day as pocket money from his ustaad, which goes a long way for his family, who live in a slum in the capital, known as ‘Shopper Colony’, in sector G-8.

Aitesham is but one of nearly 25 million children of school-going age (between five and 16 years of age) who are not enrolled in an educational institution. A new report by education campaigners Alif Ailaan, puts the number of out-of-school-children in the country at around 25 million. However, the estimate is a loose one, and the report draws on four different data sources to arrive at the ballpark figure.

Due to an absence of independently-collected primary data on the issue, anyone talking about the issue of out-of-school-children can only guess at a ballpark figure. Lately, opposition politicians such as Syed Khurshid Shah and protesting leaders such as Imran Khan and Dr Tahirul Qadri, have been putting the number of out-of-school-children in the country anywhere between 25 to 30 million.

New report looks to reconcile conflicting estimates of number of out-of-school children in the country

The forthcoming Alif Ailaan report bases its conclusions on four different data sources: the Annual Status of Education Report (Aser), prepared by the Idara-i-Taleem-o-Agahi; the National Education Management Information System (Nemis), managed by the Academy for Education Planning and Management; the Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement (PSLM) survey, carried out by the Bureau of Statistics; and the Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey (PDHS) a national household survey conducted by the government’s National Institute of Population Studies.

However, none of the four sources agree with each other. The Nemis figure is closest to the final estimate of 25 million, while PSLM estimates the number to be 16.19 million, PDHS estimates 19.42 million and Aser puts the number at 8.82 million.

But these are more than just figures in an Excel sheet. Behind each of these astronomical numbers is the story of a child left behind.

Khalida sells corn with her uncle.

Eight-year-old Khalida does not go to school because her conservative father does not let her, but her elder sister is enrolled in a religious seminary located near the family’s home. She now helps her uncle, Gul Shah, who sells roasted corn by the roadside. He told Dawn that while he was in favour of the child going to school, the final decision was down to her father, who was a rigid man.

Saad Nisar, 8, has had anything but a normal life. Born into a broken home, the poor child has grown up amidst family tensions and constant bickering in the household. Last year, his family enrolled him in a couple of schools in the Bhara Kahu area, but he could not cope and dropped out of each one.

Nine-year-old Nadeem, however, is sick of what he called “the broken system”. Snipping away at a customer’s locks at his father’s barber shop, the boy says he wanted to go to school. He completed his primary education from Bahawalpur and had come to Rawalpindi to pursue further studies. But despite the passage of nearly three months, he is unable to find admission anywhere. He blames his old school’s headmaster for his troubles.

“There was shortage of students at our school. When I applied for a school-leaving certificate, he refused to issue one. When my family pressed him, he issued me a faulty certificate, full of errors, which has been rejected by every school I have visited since,” he told Dawn. “I’ve already wasted so much time, I don’t want to waste any more,” he said with finality.

The full report, titled, ‘Broken Promises: The crisis of Pakistan’s out-of-school children’, will be launched by education campaigners Alif Ailaan on Tuesday.

Published in Dawn, October 20th, 2014