Sindh Education department is in talks with the Department for International Development (DFID) of UK to take over its primary education project. Sources in Sindh Education Ministry revealed that DFID has successfully completed its pilot project to enroll out-of-school children into low cost primary schools in their areas of residence.
The project was started in December 2012, and under this project around 130,000 out-of-school children got enrolled in various programmes so far.
In a meeting on April 23, with the senior education minister, DFID has requested the Sindh govt to take over the project and sources at the Education Ministry said that the department is very likely to do so and it would be a great achievement for Sindh Education Ministry to give due support to the education sector. It is pertinent to mention here that as per a report by Alif Ailaan, there are 12 million children between the ages of 5 and 16 in Sindh and 6.2 million (51pc) of them are out-of-school. The share of girls is 3.4 million.
Recently Sindh chief minister has asked Sindh Education Foundation (SEF) to achieve its target of bringing 250,000 children to schools during academic year 2016-2017. By taking over this project, SEF's target would be reduced to only half helping them to focus on delivery of quality education to these and other children being inducted in schools.
According to Alif Ailaan, ghost schools are also a serious problem as according to the recent survey of non-functional and ghost schools by the Supreme Court of Pakistan, there are at least 6,164 non-functional and ghost schools in Sindh.
This means that every 7th school in Sindh is either a ghost school or non-functional. "Keeping in mind the education crisis in Sindh and plight of government schools, short-term solution to bring OOSC in schools is to get help of low cost private schools and get OOSC enrolled in low cost private schools of respective areas, while simultaneously improving the condition of Government schools," said education expert and principal of a school being run on not for profit basis, Zaiton Bawany.