Madiha Afzal : Punjab’s education success story

Society Pakistan & World Affairs
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](http://tribune.com.pk/story/579652/punjabs-education-success-story/)Punjab is lahaz se khush qismat h … phle Pervez Ilahi ne Punjab m buht kaam kraya aur ab Shahbaz Sharif ne … If PML-N swept in May 2013 elections in whole Punjab winning 136 General Seats out of 148 …tau is k peche valid reason tha …Imran Khan and their supporters in PTI failed to calculate all this and result is in front of us … !*Punjab’s Education Success Story**

*By Madiha Afzal *Published: July 20, 2013


The writer is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Brookings Institution.

“One child, one teacher, one book and one pen can change the world. Education is the only solution. Education first.” So ended Malala Yousufzai’s rousing speech before the UN Youth Assembly on July 12. Malala voiced a call to action to fulfil the universal right to education for every child. With 40 million out of 70 million Pakistani children aged five to 19 not attending school, Pakistan is performing poorly in this regard. Given this, it rightly seems that we have mountains to climb before we can educate all our children.

But this is not a column about how dismal things look, about how our government is inefficient, and how our citizenry is unmotivated. It is about the steps that are being taken in the right direction, especially in Punjab. Here is a look at some of the** “good news” from Punjab’s education sector**, as** Sir Michael Barber, Department for
International Development’s (DFID)** special representative for education in Pakistan, describes it.

Due to a number of interventions, which are part of a larger reform road map, teacher presence and student attendance numbers have shown impressive increases in Punjab****.

Both the percentages of teachers present and of already enrolled students attending class were greater than 92 per cent in December 2012, up from 72 per cent and 82 per cent in September 2011, respectively. The percentage of schools with functioning facilities has also increased from 69 per cent to 91 per cent in the same time frame.

Enrollment has seen increases for the five-to-nine-year age range, but most of these come from kachi (or kindergarten classes) and do not yet extend all the way through primary school. While some areas in Punjab have laudably passed the** 90 per cent enrollment mark**, others, such as rural areas and southern Punjab, as well as girls’ schools, clearly lag behind.

In addition, students are learning more. The latest Annual Status of Education Report, which assessed over 60,000 children from all Punjab districts, reveals significant gains in learning outcomes for both literacy and numeracy. Clearly, there is muchmore work to be done, but the above indicators show progress.

A number of policy innovations, fostered by the DFID and led by the Punjab government, have made these developments possible. Greater monitoring of schools has been instrumental in improving teacher presence. This has been made possible by the tireless work done by a revamped programe monitoring and implementation unit. Also key is the **Punjab Education Foundation, **which enables poor children to attend low-cost private schools for free.

There is also the** Punjab Educational Endowment Fund (PEEF), established in 2009 to provide merit-based scholarships and assistance in the 16 less-developed districts in Punjab. It has awarded over 41,000 scholarships, worth over Rs 2 billion.
**

A number of government policies specifically target girls and young women. Under the Punjab Education Sector Reform Programme, annual cash stipends worth** Rs 1.5 billion **are provided to **380,000 girls **in grades six to 10 in government schools, in **16 out of the 36 Punjab districts. **

The objective is to improve enrollment and increase retention. The beneficiary girls are given Rs.2,400 a year conditional on an 80 per cent attendance rate.

Some of Punjab’s policies and successes will be replicable and some will need to be adapted for the other provinces. The DFID is providing its second-largest funding to** Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa** with the expectation that some of these successes can be reproduced there. Balochistan is implementing a programme similar to the** PEEF**, in a good example of inter-provincial policy learning.

All of the above implies that** Punjab is making strides in solving the access issue and in increasing the quantity of education supplied, at least at the primary level**. But what about the quality of education? There are serious issues with our curricula and in our textbooks, as well as in how we expect our students to learn from these materials.

While it appears that the 2006 curriculum reform recommendations have been incorporated in Punjab’s latest textbooks, there is no analysis yet of the quality of these textbooks. Over the next few weeks, I will be undertaking exactly that task.
*

Published in The Express Tribune, June 21[SUP]st[/SUP], 2013.

*http://tribune.com.pk/story/579652/punjabs-education-success-story/

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Re: Madiha Afzal : Punjab’s education success story

Oh wait ... this is another film by shobaz sharif .... !

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Re: Madiha Afzal : Punjab’s education success story

Madiha Afzal

https://www.publicpolicy.umd.edu/sites/default/files/styles/directory-thumbs/public/sites/default/files/field/image/madiha-afzal.jpg?itok=qt-p6X83

Madiha Afzal is an Assistant Professor of International Development at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy. Her current work examines the determinants of support for militancy and terrorism in Pakistan, with a particular focus on the effect of education and gender on radicalization. Dr. Afzal has written for The Express Tribune and Foreign Policy on girls’ education and terrorism in Pakistan. Her other areas of research include elections in Pakistan and Pakistanis’ views of the United States. Dr. Afzal received her PhD in Economics from Yale University in 2008, specializing in Development Economics and Political Economy. Her dissertation examined voter rationality and legislator behavior in Pakistan and India. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Economics (with minors in Computer Science and Mathematics) from the Lahore University of Management Sciences in 2002, where she was ranked first in her graduating class. Dr. Afzal has also been a Consultant at the World Bank, is currently a Non-Resident Fellow at the Brookings Institution, as well as a Research Fellow at CISSM and at the Center for Economic Research in Pakistan. She grew up in Lahore, Pakistan, and Montreal, Canada.

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Re: Madiha Afzal : Punjab’s education success story

once again, a news article without any comments of your own despite repeated reminders.

I am locking this thread :)

you can pm me or other forum mod with an intention to add your comment and i shall open the thread.

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Re: Madiha Afzal : Punjab’s education success story

Another one of your lame post which just show some figures nothing on ground work and reality!

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Re: Madiha Afzal : Punjab’s education success story

^^ Or perhaps some future consultancy move by madiha for GoP … :kiss:

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Re: Madiha Afzal : Punjab’s education success story

Rising Lahore and Reviving Pakistan

*By Shahid Javed Burki
*

The writer is a former caretaker finance minister and has served as vice-president at the World Bank

Lahore has had several periods of glory in its long history of more than 2,000 years. If it was not the capital of the political system of the day, it was the centre of the northern part of the Indian subcontinent. During the Afghan and Mughal dynasties that ruled from Delhi, Lahorewas the second most important city of the empire that was in place at that time. But it lost that position when another invader entered India, this time from Europe and from the sea. It spent a great deal of time, energy and resources in developing three port cities in India — Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. The rulers thus made India what it never was — a maritime power.

The rulers who preceded them had entered India from the mountain passes in the north and passed through Lahore on their way to Delhi. Eventually, the British realised that the vast empire they were in the process of building, demanded a different seat of power. This was brought home to them by the Great Indian Mutiny of 1857.

However, even when the British formally incorporated India into their large empire and moved the capital inland to Delhi, the port cities retained their importance. For the British, Lahore became one of the regional centres, not the most important city after Delhi, the capital.

What history tells us is that the fortunes of a large city are determined by the structure of the political system of which it is a part. As will be discussed in this series of articles, Lahore suffered enormously from the wrenching delivered by Partition of British India. During the Pakistan period, Lahore was thrust into the background by the three groups that governed the country in quick succession.

For a decade and a half, political power was in the hands of the refugees who had come from the urban areas of the Muslim minority provinces of British India. They settled in Karachi for the simple reason that it was chosen to be the country’s capital. They had fought for the creation of an independent Muslim state to have access to political power. That seat of power was now Karachi. The refugees — later to be called the** muhajirs** — took command of both the political and bureaucratic systems of the new country. However, their hold over power could not go unchallenged in a country in which they constituted a small minority.

This group was replaced by the military that governed with some interruptions for 50 years from 1958 to 2008. It chose to move the capital from Karachi to a new site in the neighbourhood of Rawalpindi, the location of its headquarter. Given the military’s preference for centralised command and control, it put the twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi at the centre of the system of governance. In the period since 2008, the reins of government were in the hands of a political party that was interested in promoting the development of the country’s south.

The 2013 elections have fundamentally altered that calculus. But it was not this regional orientation that led the governing group to be sidelined in the elections. It was the great disappointment with the way it governed that removed it so decisively from power.

It was the changing shape of the country’s political landscape that thrust Lahore into the background. While Karachi was being developed as the country’s capital that was where a good part of investment, both by the government and the private sector, went.

Geography matters in economics, particularly the role cities must play in development. If ignored, geography will take its revenge. This is happening in several parts of the Muslim world where cities provide the physical environment, which makes it possible for the disaffected people to coalesce. The May elections have brought the same political party to power in Islamabad, as well as Lahore.

It can develop growth strategies for the country and for the province that will complement each other. Rather than stand in the way of Lahore as it begins to work for the realisation of the enormous growth potential of the city and of the province of which it is the capital, Islamabad can — and undoubtedly will — play a supporting role.

***It will aid rather than deter the city’s advancement and the role it can play in reviving Pakistan — not only its economy, but also the state of its society. Lahore, liberated from the harness of regional politics it was forced to wear, can place itself at the centre of the much-needed efforts to revive Pakistan.

This brief review of history leads to a number of important questions for Pakistan. In its current depressed state, could a city provide the dynamism that the country sorely needs? Could a resurgent Lahore perform that role? Could the political transformation brought about in the country by the elections of 2013, place the capital of Punjab at the centre of Pakistan’s economic revival?

***The answers to all three questions are ‘yes’. If these are indeed the answers, those who will plan to build Pakistan’s economic future, should seriously factor in the role that Lahore can play in the country’s economic revival. This, then, is the analytical framework I will use for this series of articles.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 22[SUP]nd[/SUP], 2013.*

http://tribune.com.pk/story/579971/rising-lahore-and-reviving-pakistan/

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Re: Madiha Afzal : Punjab’s education success story

So many 'job application' type articles being published by 'experts' these days.