LAHORE: The International Literacy Day is celebrated on Sept 8 every year to acknowledge progress in literacy and to foster a more literate society. The day brings together the policymakers, development partners and practitioners to make meaningful policies in the field of literacy and non-formal education. Demand-driven and human-centered policies are required in the literacy and non-formal education sector to harness the transformative power of literacy.

The basic theme of this year’s International Literacy Day is, “Promoting literacy for a world in transition: Building the foundation for sustainable and peaceful societies”.

Pakistan is facing a huge challenge of increasing the number of out-of-school children (OOSC) and adult illiteracy. Such children comprise both the dropouts and the children who never attended any school. It is estimated that there are 22.8m out-of-school children in the country aged between 5 and 16. This is the world’s second highest number of out-of-school children. Similarly, literacy rate of Pakistan being 62.8pc renders around 90m illiterates.

Literacy and non-formal education sector is the least understood subject in Pakistan. There is a huge lapse in understanding the basic concept of this sector. People are unaware of the ‘who, what, where and how’ of this sector. Parents of the out-of-school children and illiterate persons have no idea as to which department and organisation is working for elimination of illiteracy, how out-of-school children who are overage and can’t be enrolled in the formal education sector can get education.

Lack of literacy financing keeps the non-formal education sector at bay, which otherwise can play an important role in supplementing the formal education sector, especially enrolling large numbers of out-of-school children and providing literacy to the adult illiterates.

In Pakistan, major literacy financing is internal and the government cannot finance to cater to a huge number of out-of-school children and adult illiterates. Role of the private sector in the non-formal education sector is also very minimal. Increased population growth rate in Pakistan is causing a significant increase in the number of out-of-school children and adult illiterates each year.

Currently, the literacy and non-formal basic education sector in Pakistan works on a two-pronged strategy. One, non-formal education institutions (NFEIs) are established without involvement of brick and mortar. The area where the number of out of school children is high with no public or private sector school in the vicinity, the teacher engaged by the government opens the school by dedicating one room in their house. In this multi-grade teaching model, the average duration of six classes (from class nursery to class five) is 48 months instead of 72 months. The accelerated learning programmes (ALP) or accelerated education programmes (AEP) further reduces the learning cycle of six classes to 32 months based on ALP curricula. The government provides honorarium to the teachers and literacy and learner kits comprising textbooks etc.

Secondly, adult literacy centers (ALCs) are opened on the same grounds where English, Urdu and numeracy is taught to the adult illiterates for the duration of eight months.

Currently, there are 40,696 non-formal schools in the country with 1,615,176 enrollment. But these existing numbers of non-formal schools are nowhere near to achieving the dream of 100pc literacy in Pakistan, especially fulfilling the commitment to the SDG 4, including the SDG target 4.6 on youth and adult literacy and numeracy. We need to build a very robust and all-inclusive literacy and non-formal education sector policy framework. This policy framework needs to be built upon six building blocks of the literacy and non-formal education sector. These six building blocks are literacy governance, literacy financing, literacy workforce, literacy information systems, literacy mobilization and literacy curriculum and research.

Literacy financing is a fundamental requisite of literacy and non-formal education sector. The CCTs (conditional cash transfers) offered by the BISP should be linked and offered to all the out-of-school children enrolled in non-formal schools and adult literacy centres. Similarly, an enabling environment should be created for the private sector.

Literacy workforce is composed of all people engaged in action whose primary intent is to enhance literacy, promoting literacy and non-formal education. The literacy workforce includes teachers, literacy mobilizers, as well as management and support staff. Currently, robust and comprehensive methodologies are not available for assessing the adequacy of literacy workforce.

Literacy mobilisation is another building block which needs to be reinforced. Creating awareness amongst the masses especially at far off areas where the rate of out of school children is high and community engagement throughout the learning cycle is imperative. Community engagement will increase the visibility and understanding of the non-formal education sector.

The literacy curriculum and research are one of the major building blocks having four major parameters; accelerated learning programs, achieving quality and standards through regular monitoring of student learning outcomes, research-based assessment and introducing technical knowledge at all levels. More focus should be given to teacher training and fostering new curricula based on accelerated learning models.

(The writer is director general, Literacy and Non-Formal Education Punjab.)

Published in Dawn, September 8th, 2023