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given indicators (Punjab/Sindh/KP). Punjab is more advanced on the governance dimension
pushing for tech enabled governance improvements as data for public good. The Punjab
Information Technology Board (PITB) is the IT-armof the Government of Punjab, Pakistan. With
a population of 110 million the province has many information, services and governance
challenges.
As a core strategy, PITB leverages mobile technologies and open-source platforms to design
terrain-viable solutions for real-time monitoring, on-spot assessment, and citizen feedback.
Their tablet-PC and smart-phone based systems enable thousands of government officers across
the province to capture and reliably share monitoring and evaluation information every day.
This steady stream of data is automatically consolidated in real-time, and made available to
decision-makers as actionable information in the form of SMS-alerts and online dashboards.
Similarly, in Sindh ILMI is a public complaint system for education in Sindh that has been
successful in pushing for action as a response to citizens's complaints.
Fourth, whilst learning needs to be measured regularly, disaggregated and sensitive to the most
vulnerable, data needs to be made freely accessible to citizens. This evidence must drive
interventions for high performance on what works for quality and what does not. Public policy
and planning driven by evidence based culture to drive performance, innovations, inclusion, and
right level of financing for results at the school, district, sub-national and national levels will
make ‘learning’ everyone’s business. Recently, Punjab began an initiative through its third party
monitors called the Monitoring Education Assistants (MEAs) all 950 of them who visit a school
each month for verification on many 'functioning and governance" indicators of schools. MEAs
traditionally used paper-forms to fill out visit reports, and would submit them to district
administrative staff – who would subsequently summarize the data into ‘excel sheets. While the
paper-based reporting approach served as a means of collecting and storing lots of paper, the
traditional data-tabulation process was inherently delay-prone and open to several layers of
operator errors and potential data manipulation.
To offset this in 2014, PITB introduced an innovative ICT-based solution for school monitoring
and student assessment providing MEAs with low-cost tablet-PCs, and purpose-built Android-
apps for real-time data capture. With access to Hence, these solutions have been rolled out at
mass-scale. Since August 2014, over 1 Million school-visit and 2.2 Million student assessments
have been logged into a central online reporting system. MEAs have real-time access to a central
question-bank mapped to students learning outcomes in Urdu, English and Maths. MEAs select
random questions for grade 3 and SMS-alerts for stakeholder. These tablet-based systems have
become an integral component of Punjab’s multiyear School Reforms Roadmap. These systems
now fuel the Education Stock-take presentations on quality, access and equity made to the Chief
Minister and Chief Secretary every eight weeks.
Fifth, teachers’ competencies and knowledge remain a challenge when it comes to working with
the most excluded and poorest. On the one hand child centered pedagogies integral to pre and
in-service programs in Pakistan need to translate into active practice, and, on the other, teachers
need to develop attributes of nurturing and care. They also need to be sufficiently competent
and knowledgeable to be able to deliver the requistive learning to children. A recent World Bank
study in Pakistan has noted the deeply unsatisfactory levels of teacher competence in rural
Punjab andmore worryingly the inability of teachers to transfer their own knowledge effectively
to their pupils (Dhundar et al. 2014). This finding is reiterated by Aslam et al. (2016) who find a
noticeable lack of content knowledge and inability to explain the curriculum as well as a poor
ability to spot mistakes made by students. Teachers themselves are found to acknowledge that