Education of Disadvantaged Children in OIC:
The Key to Escape from Poverty
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Sindh Education Sector Plan (SESP) 2014-2018474: The Sindh ESP focuses on increasing access to
education for the most-marginalized children including girls, and improving learning outcomes,
resource allocations as well as governance and accountability in the education sector. In addition
it covers areas such as ICT, Education in Emergencies, Social Cohesion and Public-Private
Partnership.
Balochistan Education Sector Plan (BESP) 2013-2018475: The Balochistan ESP has similar overall
goals to the SESP on access, quality and governance/accountability (including improved teachers’
management). In addition, given its geography and the dispersion of schools, it focuses on
expanding alternate forms of school delivery (private and community schools), on preparing a
new school language policy conducive to learning as well as focusing on improved
monitoring/supervision through upgraded information collection mechanisms.
The rest of the section will cover a number of policy interventions that have had a wide range of
objectives (demand-side, supply-side/governance).
Poverty: Demand side policy examples 476
A recent update of the poverty line based on 2013-2014 survey data places around 29% of
Pakistanis below the poverty, with many others vulnerable to shocks likely to push them below
the poverty line477. Under the 2001 formula, the percentage of people below the poverty line fell
by around 25 percentage points, from a high of 34.6% in 2001-02 to 9.3% in 2013-14. As such, it
estimated 20 million poor people whereas the new estimate triples the number to about 60
million.
With cost of schooling and child labour being important demand-side barriers to education and
with a third of the population below the poverty line, social protection policies that support poor
households are a significant approach to alleviating certain demand-side barriers and improving
overall access to schooling. Policies to support the access to education of children from poor
households include the provision of cash, with or without conditionalities. For example, district
level initiatives include educational stipend disbursements for girls in Sindh, Punjab and KP. (see
Annex 5 for details on the provincial stipend programs and innovations).
Beyond these examples of stipends at the provincial or district level, a major national level social
protection scheme is the Benazir Income Support Program (BISP), the country’s flagship
national safety net programme that provides predictable income support through unconditional
cash transfers to more than 5.2 million families478. It created a National Socio-Economic Registry
based on Proxy-Means Test that covers approximately 167 million people and which is used by
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476 see Annex 3 for further details on the examples mentioned
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478