Reposing their overwhelming confidence over the educational model of the Punjab Education Foundation (PEF) for being cost effective, result oriented and efficient various developing Asian countries have contemplated to introduce PEF model of public-private partnership for educating the children belonging to poor and needy families in their countries.
Chairman PEF Raja Muhammad Anwar disclosed this while talking to journalists at his office after attending a two day international conference at Katmandu, Nepal the other day. The conference was largely attended by representatives of Cambodia, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, India, Nepal and Pakistan. Raja Anwar represented PEF in the conference and briefed the participants about the PEF's Public Private Partnership model. The objective of the model is to provide quality educational services to the impecunious strata through low cost schools.
Anwar said that PEF education voucher scheme is the biggest educational initiative in the whole world which has provided free education to one hundred and forty thousand students in the province. These students have been selected after a carefully held social survey to study the poverty ratio in the province. He also appreciated the contribution of voluntary organisation in the promoting education at the grass root level.
The conference participants greatly lauded the philosophy of voucher scheme and shown their keen interest to personally visit the PEF partner schools in Punjab for benefiting from this useful model. Besides educational experts of UK and other European countries representatives of various NGO's and school education departments from Pakistan also attended the conference.