It is a great pleasure for me to be here with you on the culmination event of the campaign titled ‘Parent Ittehad as Critical Mass to Demand Access to Quality Education’, said the State Minister. I am thrilled to see the participation of the parents and communities from various parts of the country here. Provision of education is the basic responsibility of the government but state alone could not fulfill its commitments and then the role of civil society and the organizations like RSPN and Alif Ailaan becomes far more important.
If we critically look at the current state of education for the children between the age of 5 and 16 years, approximately 24.02 million children are out of school. Only 28% children enrolled in grade 1 reach grade 10. The alarming figure comes at the level of primary education where 69% dropouts take place in the first 5 years of schooling. Notwithstanding some improvement in public school facilities, a lot is still required as 44% of schools do not have electricity, 34% do not have drinkable water, 30% do not have boundary walls and 28% do not have bathroom facilities and so on so forth.
Nevertheless, there are several indicators’ that show some healthy trends too. For instance the school retention has increased from 25% to 28%, and primary level enrolment has increased from 15.5 to 15.8 million. Similarly, the number of OSCs decreased from 25 million to 24 million, missing facilities at school have been improved and the government at all levels is making efforts to decrease this figure. Now in all our efforts to improve the state of education, we see the role of parents, communities, civil society and media as vital.
Minister of State said that these kinds of initiatives indeed are eye openers for the district, provincial and federal machineries to look rightly in to the issues. We are here to work for the betterment of the country and specially to improve the state of education of our children.
In this era, where technology is touching zenith, competitions in every field of life are much stronger and the market economies are replacing every other model, we have to work hard to educate our children for better future. In this regard, I am grateful to the organizations like rural support programmes that are mobilizing communities on the issues like education, and are enabling them through trainings on lobbying and advocacy.
Event was attended by Mr. Shoaib Sultan Khan (Chairman, Rural Support Programme Network), Ms Shandana Khan (CEO RSPN), Mr. Mosharraf Zaidi (Campaign Director, Alif Ailaan).
Later Minister of State Engr Muhammad Baligh Ur Rehman attended the 6th international Conference on Innovative Computing Technology (INTECH 2016) arranged by Islamia university Bahawalpur. The three days event has been arranged in collaboration with the HEC, Digital Information Research UK, IEEE UK and Ireland Section in order to highlight the computing technologies for the new generation.
This initiative is the part of national vision of universal access to the internet. Interlinking of campuses of 100 universities under the HEC’s Smart Universities Project through WI-FI and video link is one of the recent advancements in education sector in Pakistan, state the State Minister. He said that this conference would bring all the stakeholders of education together to create a forum to accelerate the building of ICT infrastructure in Pakistan. He thanked and admired the efforts of the organizers and said that once being an engineering student himself he knows the importance of this conference. He has been a part of IEEE when he started his engineering, he mentioned that engineers want to know the solution of every problem and that is the best thing about them. So instead of criticizing the system all the time, we all should think of the solutions of our educational problems in Pakistan.
In the end, Vice Chancellor of Islamia University Bahawalpur Dr. Qaiser Mushtaq presented the shield of appreciation to the Minister of State.
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