At the World Education Forum held at Dakar, Senegal, in year 2000, all the 189 member nations pledged to equip their children and youth population with a high quality primary, secondary and tertiary education along with their exclusive commitment to achieve their Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of Universal Primary Education or in other words primary education for all by year 2015.
Taking it as a widely accepted humanitarian obligation and globally mandated human right. This commitment is also based on the understanding that all gender disparities would be eliminated and children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary education.
The strategy to evaluate progress towards attainment of the said MDG has focus on quality of education as logically quantity is easily measurable, but it distorts the end-results.
Since education is the vital need for developing the society as a whole as such education lacking in quality fails to bring the desired/targeted socio-economic well-being. Quality education translates into greater earnings for individual over their lifetime.
A country with a skilled and educated work force can achieve a sustained and fast economic growth rate. The importance of human capital developed through quality education and trade skills has universal recognition for speedy economic growth of a country.
In the context of low income developing economies, the development of human capital has gained more importance as these countries have set priorities for eradicating or rather arresting growing poverty and combating all exploitations against disadvantaged segments of their population, which are achievable only through sustained and speedy growth rate of their economies.
Woman and girl child are the most neglected components of global population. Women comprise almost 60% of the world population living below the poverty line. It is mainly lack of economic independence, entailing social exploitation of women, particularly in developing countries of South East Asia and Africa through ages-old savage customs and traditions.
Women of South Asian countries, including Pakistan, are in most pathetic condition regarding their socio-economic status, which is mainly due to their deprivation from decision making process in almost all phases of their life cycle, which in turn is the outcome of male dominant gender power relation.
Women are not encouraged to express their opinion even in such personal matters like choosing life partners, family planning and inheritance of family property. In patriarchal social environment decision-making remains a male prerogative. The one-sided, male-dominant development thinking has resulted in grossly inadequate government's investment on development of women human capital and consequently women's basic needs remain unattended. Education, being vital and basic need for development of human resources, has the possibility of making both the individual receiving it and others better off.
A well educated society, having the desired number of professionals in all fields of the economy, can experience high rate of innovations and development of new technologies, thus make everybody more productive, engaged in various lines of trades.
The study conducted at World Bank to assess the impact of quality education on economic growth reveals that emphasis on teaching science and mathematics in a country leads to rise of one percentage point in normal incremental annual economic growth rate of that country. The study also reveals that education reforms introduced in a country make the impact feel overtime depending on the pace of implementation of the reform programme. However, even in the case of slow progress with regard to reforming education brings significant results in the long run.
Findings of the study also give the hope that a country embarked on starting a 20-year education reform programme at a point of time let us say in 2005, can expect to pay for all of its educational expenditures by 2040 with the growth dividend. These findings are, however, based on the assumptions of good governance in all tiers of education system of a country and more importantly its political stability.
Another research study conducted by World Bank reveals 'that a country with poor governance tend to have growth of about 1.6 percentage point lower per year than other countries and the effect of governance on growth is transmitted through indirect channels via social indicators and investments.
In the case of Pakistan despite major initiatives taken by the present government to achieve MDGs with regard to 'Education for all' and improvement in the quality of education imparted in State-owned schools, things are very slow to turn around due to built-in inefficiencies and corruption in all tiers of bureaucracy in the educational sector.
Lack of political instability in the country, being a norm of its existence for almost half of a century, is responsible for low literacy rate and other shortcomings in educational sector due to discontinuation of educational reforms introduced by each successive government with change of each political set-up.
However, in the context of Pakistan, apart from under-spending (2.3% of GDP) on education in comparison to internationally accepted benchmark of 4% of GDP given by UNESCO for funds allocation for education, it is lack of monitoring for utilisation of funds allocated, particularly in the development budget for education, which makes funds either misutilised or lapsed substantially almost every year.
No doubt concerted efforts are being made at all levels of government to achieve MDGs relating to 'Education for all' and maximising access to technical and higher education, the education policy in force does not recognise the need of bringing uniformity regarding the standard of education in all educational institutions to remove overall disparities and inequalities from socio-economic environment of the country.
In the public sector educational institutions, teachers' quality level is totally overlooked, which is the main reason for fast deterioration of the standard of education in these institutions. Policy-makers, having due concern for improving the quality of education in the country, must focus on improving the overall quality of teaching force of public sector schools and colleges, where mostly students from financially disadvantaged families are enrolled.
The policy relating to hiring of teachers needs to be reviewed/revised. Instead of retaining the existing teaching staff of public sector educational institutions, majority of whom are lacking in required academic and professional qualifications and above all are totally devoid of commitment to their job, needs to be replaced by competent teachers, who should be hired on contract basis and their remuneration should be strictly performance-related. Further, the programme should be in place for upgrading their teaching skills on continuous basis. However, in general, if the teaching force is to be improved, either the hiring must select better teachers or in the case of retention of the existing teaching staff, policy must be skewed towards the best teachers.
For improving the quality of teaching staff in the public sector schools the government can experiment with alternative incentive schemes.
These might involve accelerated promotions, cash awards, training prospects in well-reputed foreign universities and conferring of national awards etc. Millennium Development Goals relating to education advocate for promoting quality higher education and making it accessible to the maximum number of deserving students.
From the very outset Pakistan has recognised the need of providing higher education to all as envisaged in Article 37(C) of the country's Constitution of 1973, which stipulates that "make technical education and professional education generally available, and higher education equally accessible to all on the basis of merit" Establishment of Higher Education Commission with the sole purpose of ensuring quality and research-oriented education in the country, which may bring about the much needed highly skilled and professionally equipped work force in all spheres of economy is a strong initiative from the side of government.
For promoting higher education among women, the government initiatives are visible in almost all the provinces. Women universities and exclusively women medical colleges have been set up to facilitate higher education for those girl students whose parents do not favour co-education.
In medical and engineering colleges/universities and business schools with co-education arrangements entry is open to girl students strictly on merit and without any discrimination.
Some financial institutions, including the Institute of Bankers in Pakistan, have opened doors to the students seeking professional education in banking without any gender discrimination. It is now a universally recognised fact that investment in human capital in the context of education at all levels brings adequate personal and social return both for men and women.
A better-educated and trained work force deployed for a project would ensure higher operational efficiency of the project as a whole. According to findings of a study conducted at De Beauk University of Brussels, investments in education of all levels give much higher return than the rate of return on investment in physical capital and the rate of return from the latter also depends on skills and expertise of human capital (manpower) involved at different stages of a project, irrespective of the fact whether it is a commercial or non-profit entity.
Another finding of the said study reveals that investment in girl child education yields especially high returns. It is a globally recognised fact that women empowerment in absolute terms is the outcome of their economic independence/empowerment, which is facilitated through acquiring higher education, including technical and professional education. Higher technical and professional education makes possible women's entry into specialised fields of finance, engineering, health, education and commerce and industry and then reaching senior management positions, where the decision-making rests.
It is unfortunate that overall literacy rate of Pakistan is very low even among low income developing countries and consequently female literacy rate in remote areas of its provinces like Balochistan and N.W.F.P is even less than 2%. No doubt under "Education for all" programme special incentives are being offered to girls for motivating parents to send their daughters to schools and also to curtail dropout rates at the primary level, which is as high as 41%. However, in order to ensure success of all women welfare-related initiatives of government, monitoring of these projects should be assigned to women only.
Women should be involved in decisions relating to legislation process, economy and social sector to ensure that laws passed and policies approved in the assembly do not have adverse bearing on women or in other words all policies and development plans should be gender-sensitive.
For legislators in all tiers of Assemblies and Senate, one of the eligibility criteria for contesting election is their holding Bachelor's degree in any discipline of education. Hence as a result of government's endeavour to enhance women's participation in legislative process, a sizable number of women has entered assemblies and Senate. However, to make their presence effective through advocacy, there is need to expose them to behavioural skill development training programme to develop assertiveness and self-confidence among them, so that they may assert their point of view in assemblies, especially regarding elimination of discriminatory laws and exploitation against women.
Further, for ensuring women empowerment certain strategies need to be adopted at personal/individual level and some on national and international level. At the personal level, women need to know themselves their social, economic and political rights. Each and every woman must strive to acquire higher education or proficiency in various business and behavioural skills so as to get themselves not only gainfully employed/self-employed but also to assert for a level playing field for their working environments, enabling them to rise to senior echelon of management in any organisation.
In the case of doing business they may emerge as highly competitive entrepreneurs. Apart from efforts on personal level, initiative for women empowerment is also needed at the national level.
At the government level, there should be arrangements for providing encouragement and incentives as well as counselling services for girls to study scientific, technical and managerial subjects at all levels in order to enhance the aptitude of women for decision-making, management and leadership. Further, a system should be in place for making educational and vocational training accessible to women, including those fields where technologies are improving rapidly like Information Technology (IT).
Awareness regarding women's right to education in general and higher and professional education in particular and information regarding ways and means to facilitate acquiring education need to be disseminated through non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in less-developed urban and rural areas of the country. To conclude, quality is to be injected at all levels of education and it be made accessible to all eligible segments of society.
The primary, secondary and tertiary education is complimentary to each other. Acquiring higher education can be productive only if it rests on quality solid primary and secondary education and early education can be productive only if it is reinforced by quality secondary and tertiary education.
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