Education of Disadvantaged Children in OIC:
The Key to Escape from Poverty
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(and doctors) which further limits the access to education of future generations by exacerbating
teacher shortages and health/nutrition challenges that affect school attendance.
Supply-side: Education System Governance
Governance:
Devolution transition. The 2010 devolvement of education planning to the provinces entailed a
period of transition to the new system. The bureaucratic systems needed time to adjust to the
requirements of the new amendments, leading to procedural delays in financial and technical
issues. Devolution has not been homogenous in the different provinces and disparities in
implementation reflected the variance in resources generated by different districts, the different
institutional capacities440 and political will. For instance, KP took the lead in developing its first
comprehensive Education Sector Plan (ESP), which ran from 2010-2015. Punjab and Sindh
followed with their own ESP and Balochistan’s ESP covers 2013-2017.
Generally, district and provincial education planners lacked the required skills and needed quality
training on how to implement education policies and create education plans/strategies in their
districts/regions. While progress has been made, the institutional capacity is still being built.
Accountability. The monitoring and evaluation (M&E) mechanisms in the education sector are also
weak. Financial constraints and inadequate recruitment policies lead to a shortage of school
supervisory teams and the lack of M&E led to variance in service delivery and low incentives for
performance by teachers and support staff across schools. In addition, parental and community
participation in school matters is not effective which presents a further challenge to the effective
monitoring of the quality of education 441. A challenge for accountability is the different lengths of
school year between provinces and schools hours, due to weather conditions and government
deciding to start or end school term early. These external changes impacting time in class make it
difficult for schools and teachers to be accountable for the performance of their students.
Parental involvement: As just mentioned, parental/community engagement is low, particularly
in government schools442. While there are large numbers of Parent-Teacher associations (PTAs)
and School Management Committees (SMCs) (see , they have a limited role. This is
particularly true in poor areas where parents (i) are not interested or do not have time to monitor
the progress of their children or be involved in school-related matters (ii) exhibit higher levels of
illiteracy and as such teachers tends to dismiss their feedback.
440 UNICEF (2013)
441 AEPAM (2017)
442 Alif Ailaan (2014)