Education of Disadvantaged Children in OIC:
The Key to Escape from Poverty
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prone to natural disasters or experiencing security challenges. A reform of the fiscal allocation
rules to provinces, as well as clear financing plans within the provincial education sector plans,
are essential to improve access and quality of education.
The overall resources envelope needs to be increased as Pakistan is spending below average on
education (in terms of percentage of GDP). With the inclusion of Article 25a in the Constitution, it
is imperative to mobilise more resources to the sector in order to deliver on the constitutional
rights of children across the country.
PPPs and Private schools. Pakistan’s innovations also include setting up several public-private
partnerships in the education sector which should be further explored, strengthened and scaled
given the fiscal constraints and competing resource priorities. With the mushrooming of low-cost
private schools over the past two decades and their important share of total enrolment in the
country, it is also imperative to put in place an oversight mechanism to monitor and track private
schools, especially as provinces are moving towards more evidence-based policy making and
putting stronger data collection systems in place.
Implementation strategies. Over the last decades, past education plans have had difficult
implementation issues which may explain the current high out of school children numbers. With
the prioritization of education on the country’s development agenda through the devolution of
the main education responsibilities to the provinces and the far-reaching insertion of Article 25a
in the Constitution since 2010, the last few recent years have shown an increased political will to
tackle the access to schooling and education challenges, with the provincial level education sector
plans leading to incremental changes of the education system that will hopefully reflect in future
improved access and quality of education. These provincial educational sector plans have
stronger focus on the implementation aspects of reforms than the previous national level
education plans and are starting to include risk management/contingency plans to deal with
unexpected external challenges such as natural disasters and political unrest. The overall
strategies are comprehensive and address many of the key challenges and determinants to access
to quality education (see earlier section detailed the provincial Education Sector Plans). However
the focus on the implementation aspects needs to be even further strengthened, with clear
strategies with cascading logical and incremental phases.
Cross-fertilisation of best practices across provinces and districts. Punjab is leading in terms of best
practice education sector plan preparations as well as teacher management and training. Existing
cross-fertilization of best practices occurs during province level meetings and district level
meetings, however additional efforts to learn from provinces leading in different aspects need to
be reinforced. It may lead to inspire increased political commitments and the importance of strong
political commitment to education has been illustrated for instance in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
whose prioritization of education in the past years has led to remarkable improvements in
education enrolments, including for girls, in spite of its enormous contextual challenges (strong
patriarchal/traditional systems, low educational attainment baseline and so forth). Peer-to-peer
learning (mentoring schemes, short-term exchanges of district officials etc) should be part of the
overall capacity building efforts within the larger education devolution context.