KARACHI: The Sindh government is set to launch the first phase of the Facial Recognition Attendance & Monitoring Evaluation System (Frames) for students and teachers of government schools in province’s six districts, including one in Karachi, on Monday (tomorrow) as part of a broader plan to digitise school attendance across the province.

The six districts are Karachi-East, Hyderabad, Naushahro Feroze, Ghotki, Jacobabad, and Umerkot.

According to the department’s 2026 data, the province’s total education workforce for schools stands at 207,440, comprising 59,136 female staff and 148,304 male staff. Male staff constitute approximately 71.5 per cent of the total workforce, while female staff make up 29pc, reflecting a continued gender disparity across these districts.

Staff strength across the selected districts of the province is 49,565, consisting of 14,281 female staff and 35,284 male staff.

First phase of project to monitor attendance of teachers, students of govt schools will also be launched in Hyderabad, Naushahro Feroze, Ghotki, Jacobabad and Umerkot tomorrow

Speaking to Dawn, Education Minister Syed Sardar Shah said that the selection was aimed at testing the system across diverse urban and rural settings before it was scaled up province-wide.

He said that the project was about bringing transparency to the system and ensuring that human resources in schools were being utilised effectively. “For the first time, we will have verified, real-time data on who is present in school and when,” he added.

The minister said that verified attendance data was critical to improving learning outcomes and institutional discipline. “This is the first step toward a more accountable public education system in Sindh,” he added.

He said that the application has been made user-friendly and a mechanism has been put in place for timely identification and resolution of technical issues..

As per the education department’s figures, Hyderabad has the highest total staff strength, 13,729, followed by Naushahro Feroze with 10,703 and Ghotki with 7,117.

Hyderabad is also the only district where female staff in teaching roles exceed male staff, with 5,036 female teachers compared with 4,983 male teachers.

Karachi-East stands out with the highest proportion of female staff. Out of 4,444 total staff, 2,680 are female and 1,764 are male.

Officials said that the system was designed to curb absenteeism, eliminate proxy attendance and strengthen oversight.

Registration and authentication are being done jointly by the Human Resource Management Information System (HRMIS), the director general of Monitoring & Evaluation, district and town education officers, chief municipal officers and IT teams.

The officials said that the project uses facial recognition and geo-fencing through a centralised mobile application to mark and verify attendance. Each entry is linked to HRMIS profiles, school data, and geo-tags, feeding into real-time dashboards for district and provincial monitoring.

They said that the pilot project would help refine technical processes and training before Frames was rolled out to all districts.

The officials said that all teachers’ data had been collected and registered in the system.

They said that the profile of a teacher or non-teaching staff was made with photo, CNIC, contact and posting details.

The officials said that each school and teacher profile was linked with GPS coordinates of the school and when a teacher or staffer marked attendance, the app checked “In” and “Out” location, verifying they were actually present at the school.

In a statement, the education department said that teachers would not require personal mobile phones and could mark attendance using the head teacher’s or a colleague’s device.

It said that teachers would also be able to view their own attendance record on the app and download it at the end of each month. Leave applications can be submitted through the app from home and will be approved online. The FRAMES app is available for both Android and iOS devices.

The education department officials will have a dashboard to monitor teacher’s attendance In/Out time and verify real-time location.

Published in Dawn, August 16th, 2026