LAHORE, Nov 13: Pakistan is passing through a phase of “educational poverty” because of a lack of government commitment to the education sector and the Education for All goal.

Pakistan is still grappling with around 55 per cent of literacy rate and it needs at least 38 years to achieve the Universal Primary Education and 16 years to achieve 86 per cent of literacy rate, Unesco’s senior education specialist Arshad Saeed Khan said during his presentation to the print and electronic media at a “Media Forum for the Promotion of Literacy in Pakistan”. The event was organised by PACADE, an NGO on literacy, in collaboration with Unesco at a hotel here on Saturday.

Khan said “Education for All” meant that everyone had the right to quality education through opportunities available for all irrespective of gender, socio-economic background and ethnic or religious background. He said the Pakistani government had committed to achieve Education for All initiative’s six goals - expansion and improvement of early childhood care, free and compulsory primary education, provision of learning opportunities for the young ones and adults, increase in literacy rate by 50 per cent and taking it to 86 per cent by 2015, elimination of gender disparities and improvement in all aspects of education.

The Unesco official stressed that the government should make legislation for implementation of Article 25-A of the Constitution (18th Constitutional Amendment) and implement National Educational Policy’s provisions like allocation of seven per cent of the GDP for education in a phased manner by 2015. “The Pakistani government is currently spending just 2.05 per cent of the GDP on education,” he said. He said the government should make elementary education free besides offering midday meals in all schools and making available equal education opportunities for all. With regard to the concept of per-child education budget, Khan said there was a dire need to provide more funding to provinces and districts where there were higher number of out-of-school children.

Explaining the position of Pakistan among the comity of nations, Khan said the country was standing at 141st position in terms of Human Development in South and West Asia.

Stressing that education was a basic component that could trigger development in any society and country, the official said the media had a very important role to disseminate information and more importantly new ideas. He said the media should not just report events, it should analyse the root causes and suggest corrective measures. He said the sublime objective of reporting should be investigative journalism as well as public awareness about their rights. He explained as to how reporters could dig out information and highlight gaps, root causes, good practices and finally give suggestions. PACADE chairman Inayatullah said there were around 60 million above the age of 10 Pakistanis who were illiterate. He said there were about seven million out-of-school children in Pakistan.

Inayatullah, former National Commission for Literacy and Mass Education chairman, said almost 18 per cent of the world population was illiterate and 6.2 per cent of these illiterates were living in Pakistan. He said 40 to 50 per cent of students dropped out of primary schools in the first two years. He said Pakistan’s financial allocation for literacy was one of the lowest in the world. He said there were no adult literacy programmes run by provincial governments during the last two or three years in Sindh and Balochistan nor was there any approved programme for the future in these provinces. “Pakistan is one of the few countries where the number of illiterates keeps increasing,” he said.

Inayatullah offered to work with the Lahore Education Reporters Association on literacy.