Aneesa Haroon drops off her tattered school bag at her rural home in Pakistan and hurriedly eats lunch before joining her father in the sector to choose vegetables.
The 11-year-old’s entry to high school on the age of seven was the results of negotiations between teachers and oldsters in her farming village on the outskirts of Karachi.
“Initially, many parents were not in favor of educating their children,” director Rukhsar Amna told AFP.
“Some children worked in the fields and their income was considered more valuable than their education.”
Pakistan is facing a serious education crisis, with official government figures showing greater than 26 million children out of faculty, most of them in rural areas, one in every of the best rates in the world.
This weekend, Pakistan will host a two-day international summit promoting girls’ education in Muslim countries, attended by Nobel Peace Prize winner and education activist Malala Yousafzai.
In Pakistan, poverty is the most important factor keeping children out of the classroom, but the issue is exacerbated by inadequate infrastructure and under-qualified teachers, cultural barriers and the results of utmost weather attributable to climate change.
In the village of Abdullah Goth on the outskirts of Karachi, the nonprofit Roshan Pakistan Foundation school is the primary in many years to teach greater than 2,500 people.
“There hasn’t been a faculty here for generations. For the primary time, parents, the area people and youngsters realized how necessary school is,” said Humaira Bachal, a 36-year-old education activist with a foundation funded by public and private funds.
However, she added that the school’s presence was only the first obstacle.
Families only agreed to send their children in exchange for food rations to compensate for the loss of household income that the children contributed.
In Abdullah Goth, most children go to school in the morning and have time to work in the afternoon.
“Their regular support is essential to us,” said Aneesa’s father, Haroon Baloch, as he watched his daughter and niece harvest okra to sell at the market.
“People in our village raise goats and the children help graze them while we are at work. After grazing, they also help us with the work.”
Climate change is also increasingly affecting education in Pakistan.
Frequent school closures are announced due to heavy smog, heatwaves and floods, and government schools are rarely equipped with heating or fans.
In the restive provinces of Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, education is facing major setbacks due to ongoing militancy, while in the capital Islamabad, classes are routinely disrupted due to political chaos.
Although the percentage of children aged five to 16 not attending school has fallen from 44%. in 2016 to 36 percent in 2023, according to census data, their absolute number increases from year to year as the population increases.
Girls across the country are less likely to go to school, but in the poorest province of Balochistan, half of girls do not go to school, according to the Pak Alliance for Maths and Science, which analyzed government data.
Cash-strapped Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif declared an “education emergency” last year and announced an increase in the education budget from 1.7 percent of GDP to 4 percent over the next five years.
Government-funded public schools offer free education but struggle with limited resources and overcrowding, creating a huge market for private schools whose costs can start from a few dollars a month.
In a parallel system, thousands of madrasas provide Islamic education to children from the poorest families, as well as free meals and lodging, but often fail to prepare students for the modern world.
“In a sense, we are experiencing apartheid in education,” said Adil Najam, a professor of international relations at Boston University who has studied Pakistan’s education system.
“We have at least 10 different systems and you can buy any quality of education you want, from absolutely terrible to absolutely world class.
“Private nonprofit schools can energize the pump by putting out a good idea, but we’re a country of a quarter of a billion people, so these schools can’t change the system.”
Even young student Aneesa, who decided to become a doctor after health workers visited her school, sees the difference between city children.
“They don’t work in the field like we do.”
At Abdullah Goth’s small market, dozens of children can be seen coming in and out of street cafes, serving truck drivers or arranging fruit at stalls.
Ten-year-old Kamran Imran supports his father in raising three younger siblings, working in the afternoons at a motorcycle repair shop, earning 250 rupees ($0.90) a day.
Muhammad Hanif, the 24-year-old owner of the workshop, does not support the idea of education and did not send his own children to school.
“What is the point of studying if after 10-12 years we are still struggling to meet our basic needs, wasting time and finding no way out?” he told AFP.
Professor Najam said that poor quality of education was contributing to the increase in the number of children out of school.
Parents, realizing that their children cannot compete for jobs with those who attended better schools, prefer to teach them work skills.
“The quality of education in schools is as big a crisis as children’s absenteeism from school,” Najam said.
AFP
AFP
AFP
AFP
AFP
