Education of Disadvantaged Children in OIC:
The Key to Escape from Poverty
184
correlations and Shapely Decomposition results i.e. with poverty and education of households as
main determinants to access to schooling.
Lower access in Pakistan is linked on the demand side to parental attitude and participation in
school, gender expectations (including early marriage and safety), poverty, natural disasters and
migration status, refugee status, violence in schools and security concerns outside of schools
(including trafficking), health (malnutrition and stunting) and socio-economic reasons such as
cost of schooling, transports costs/distance to schools and child labour.
On the supply side, governance challenges include devolution transition, implementation
constraints (including education officials’ capacity for their new roles post 2010), varying fiscal
capacity of the provinces, weak accountability systems and low incentives for performance
(including low parental involvement), poor budget efficiencies, deficient teacher management
and training processes. Additional supply-side issues include the schools supply bottleneck at the
secondary level, difficult curriculum, language/medium of instruction and overall low quality of
education and performance of students.
While being female remains a significant challenge, past policy efforts have led to significant
increases in female participation in education, as seen from the higher growth rates of in female
enrolment compared to male enrolment. This may be due in part to several initiatives to provide
incentives for female enrolment through stipends and vouchers. Pakistan has been at the
forefront of piloting and scaling several social policies supporting education enrolment of
disadvantaged groups such as the poor or female students.
Article 25a and the consequent impetus for getting results in the education sector has encouraged
data collection and spurred capacity building of officials at provincial and district levels for design
and implementation of education plans and operations. In addition, within the larger context of
competing important fiscal priorities, listing access to quality education as a fundamental right in
the Constitution should support mobilization of resources towards the education sector in the
medium and long-term.
Recommendations
Policies toaddress Gender
There have been significant improvements in female enrolments as seen in earlier sections,
probably due to higher supply of schools but also gender equality measures such as the provincial
incentive schemes. Pakistan has been at the forefront of piloting and scaling several social policies
supporting education enrolment of disadvantaged groups such as the poor or female students.
However there is a long road ahead for gender equality, and as such provincial sector plans need
to continue their existing focus on supporting female enrolment. Beyond incentive schemes,
campaigns could be devised to address cultural barriers and sensitize the local population to the
importance of female education. Within the devolution efforts, current capacity building of
provincial, district and school officials should include a strong gender component i.e. how to
incorporate the gender dimension in the local planning as well as how to reach out to communities
for increased female enrolments. Given the security and trafficking issues, such gender
sensitization would include local police forces.