Pakistan is among those countries where, despite taking measures to improve literacy rate, the number of illiterates keeps on increasing rapidly and today around 60 million Pakistanis above the age of 10 are utterly illiterate. The chairman of the National Commission for Literacy and Mass Education (NCLME), Inayatullah, said this, while talking to Business Recorder.
Inayatullah, who is President of NGO-Pakistan Association for Continuing and Adult Education (PACADE), said that raising budgetary allocations for education sector is a must to face manifold challenges being faced by the country as well as nation.
'Education is key to the country's development and prosperity,' he said. According to him, Pakistan is among the countries in the world with the lowest literacy rate. The World Education Forum in Dakar, Senegal, in 2000 fixed six education goals for 160 countries.
The goals are to expand early childhood care education; promote learning and skills for young people and adults; increase adult literacy by 50 per cent; achieve gender parity by 2005 and gender equality by 2015 and enhance education quality. He said that according to a finding of the Unesco Golbal Monitoring Report for the year 2007, Pakistan was one of the few countries, which would fail to achieve of the six goals.
Inayatullah urged the Prime Minister to increase budgetary allocations for education sector with focus on literacy and non-formal education (NFE). He also demanded streamlining the organisational infrastructure for literacy and NFE- from national level to district level apart from setting up a National Literacy Authority.
It may be mentioned that PACADE has been running Adult Female Literacy Centres in villages near Lahore for the last 10 years. Moreover, Chairperson of NGO-Development of Nation (DoN) Amna Khan MPA, while addressing a function in connection with 'World Day against Child Labour' being observed on June 12, said, 'More than 6 million children are deprived of getting admission in the schools, while students drop out ratio is about 40-50 per cent."
Amna Khan has said that presently 7.6 million girls and 11.15 million boys are studying in the schools in rural areas, which are not even 50 per cent of the total children in the country. As per figures of United Nations millions of children are attached to bonded labour in Pakistan whereas quite a few laws exist on this issue. She said that ratio of bonded labour in the rural areas is 8 times more as compared to cities. 'If teenage boys and girls are not stopped from trapping in circle of child labour, Pakistan will soon be included in the stranglehold of bonded labour,' she added.