According to Shahid Javed Burki the National Commision for Human development is slowly transforming Pakistan… The most interesting thing in this was how a previously illiterate woman of 58, was able to read and understand an Urdu newspaper, all in the presence of Tony BLAIRS WIFE OF ALL PEOPLE.. He says that places where the commision s focusing their attention has seen SCHOOL ENROLMENT GO UP FROM 54 % TOO 85 % !!! Thats AMAZINGLY succesful…!
They are saying that the can bring PAKISTANS LITERACY UP TOO 85 % BY 2012!!! What and ACCOMPLISHMENT. Those literacy centeres we heard so much about (I thought they were just another waste of money with nothing but ghost schools everywhere) are apparently doing really really well. Here’s to Pakistan and the future…
An innovative approach
http://www.dawn.com/2006/06/13/op.htm
By Shahid Javed Burki
IN this final article on the work being done by the National Commission on Human Development to meet the basic needs of the Pakistani masses, I will first summarise the main points I made in the two preceding columns. In preparing the ground for this discussion, I made four observations.
One, all previous attempts to bring primary education and basic health care to the people relied on a top-down approach. The World Bank’s Social Action Programme was the most ambitious attempt made in this context in the past. It failed in large part because it dictated change rather than encouraged it to happen. It saw the intended beneficiaries as passive recipients of the government’s favours and it used inefficient and often corrupt government departments to utilise the resources provided by the donor community.
Two, by creating an elaborate system of local government, the regime of General Pervez Musharraf has given voice to the people. They can raise it to gain access to the services the government should provide. Experience from around the globe and Pakistan’s own experiment with the development of local government suggest that decentralisation works only when it is allowed to take root slowly. Architects of such systems must show patience and be prepared to learn from both successes and mistakes. They should be ready to face resistance from those whose power will erode once decentralisation takes hold.
Three, for a system to succeed it must be able not only to provide voice to the people, that voice must also be heard. This will only happen if local government institutions develop the capacity to use for people’s social and economic betterment the resources that national and provincial systems are prepared to provide. However, the task of building capacity at the local level is difficult, especially when the people who are being reached are largely illiterate. They will respond to the attempts directed at capacity-building when it becomes clear that such efforts are being made by those who are genuinely motivated to bring about change.
Four, it is fortunate that the capacity building effort that is central to the work of the National Commission for Human Development is being led by an individual — Dr Nasim Ashraf — who is not only committed and charismatic but has also developed into an art what economists call “learning from doing.”
I will now turn to the goals and achievements of the NCHD, starting first with the focus on capacity-building. A great deal that went wrong with the previous efforts directed at human development was the absence of focus on creating institutions that could identify people’s aspirations and then take decisions about using available resources towards meeting them. This could only happen if institution-building became the focus of attention. Institution building means many things in the context of community development. It implies closing the “capacity gap” that exists between local government institutions and governments at higher levels.
The presence of this gap means that the officials working at higher levels — in the provincial and national governments — develop a paternalistic approach. People are to be told “what to do” before they are taught “how to do.” This is essentially what is meant by pursuing a top down approach. For development to be effective communities must first identify what their priority needs are, before asking for additional resources to achieve these. There is enough experience from around the world to show that backward communities that are asked to identify priorities for development choose health and education. There is also evidence that communities don’t necessarily discriminate against girls if the society at large is more accommodating. Once they have chosen their priorities they must learn how to apply resources for implementing them.
Communities that are the target of social and economic development have to learn how to use money — in short to “budget” the available resources. This is one of the priority programmes of the commission. Over the last couple of years, it has trained 500 district education and health executive officers — to plan and budget. In addition, over 400 elected zila and tehsil level representatives, including women, have received training. Not only has this effort resulted in the more judicious use of available resources, it has also made people aware of what economists and accountants call “cost-benefit” analysis. Not surprisingly, the areas that were targeted for this type of work have performed much better in terms of achieving high levels of social and human development.
With a better trained staff and better trained and informed representatives of the people, the work done by the NHCD demonstrates that the time needed to achieve ambitious goals can be considerably reduced. Net enrolment rates have not improved much in Pakistan, according to the Medium Term Development Framework published last year by the Planning Commission; they have reached only 54 per cent of the school cohort.
The situation is very different — impressively so — in the areas in which the NHCD is concentrating its efforts. In the districts where the commission is working, net enrolment rates have increased from 54 to 85 per cent over a short period of time. Over 1.6 million children not attending schools were brought into the educational system with the help of a door-to-door campaign that persuaded parents that it made good economic sense to send their children, including girls, to school. It is important to underscore that the commission was operating within the established educational system; it was not setting up a parallel structure along with those already operating in the countryside.
In addition to enrolling more students in existing schools, the commission has also an indigenously developed literacy programme in which, after 180 hours of instruction, previously illiterate people can read fairly advanced texts, such as newspapers. I am told that when Cherie Blair, the wife of the British prime minister, visited Mansehra, a 58-year-old woman who was totally illiterate before joining the literacy programme was able to read and comprehend the headlines of an Urdu newspaper. “It was a great moment for all of us,” wrote Dr Nasim Ashraf in an e-mail to me.
The commission has started 20,000 literacy centres which have provided basic literacy to over half a million women in two years. There are plans to set up 50,000 centres a year over the next five years, which would bring literacy to six million people and increase the literacy rate by almost three percentage points a year. Coupled with the commission’s Universal Primary Education Project, which focuses on increasing school enrolment and reducing the dropout rate, the commission believes that it can have Pakistan achieve 85 per cent literacy by 2012, three years before the target date established by the UN’s millennium development goals.
The commission is also working in the area of basic health care. The programme launched by the NHCD aims to reduce infant, child and maternal mortality by using simple and well-known technologies such as oral rehydration, immunisation and pre- and post-natal care. Health workers are selected from within the targeted communities, trained and sent door-to-door to fulfil the health needs of the people. The focus is on prevention; one dollar used is prevention; it saves $18 that would need to be spent once the disease takes hold.
Finally, I should also mention an entirely new programme developed by the commission — the creation of a national volunteer corps. Thus far some 115,000 people have joined the corps; their effectiveness was vividly demonstrated during the relief efforts mounted by the government following the devastating earthquake of October 2005. This initiative was recognised by the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in his address to the General Assembly as well as at the International Conference on Volunteerism held in Islamabad in December 2004.
There is a reason why I have spent so much time and space to analyse two “micro” initiatives — the work underway by the Higher Education Commission and the National Commission for Human Development. For me, the successes already scored by these two commissions bring into sharp focus the absence of a well thought out strategy at the macro level.
This series of six articles — the first three on the effort aimed at promoting higher education, the last three on the work being done to improve capacity for development at the local level — had one underlying theme. They suggest that the Musharraf administration achieved some extraordinary successes at the micro level since it placed these efforts in a pair of very committed hands. The persons in charge were prepared to study the problem they were called upon to solve. Both the Higher Education Commission and the National Commission for Human Development began their work after the areas to be covered had been carefully studied by task forces. Unfortunately, this was not done at the macro-level — for defining a strategy for sustaining a high level of economic growth over a reasonably long period of time.
The task force that looked at higher education identified the poor quality of teaching as the most serious obstacle the country faced in equipping the people to become productive members of a growing economy. There was no point in committing additional public resources to higher education unless the quality of teachers — not just their number — was significantly improved.
Similarly, the task force that studied the problem posed by the low level of human development concluded that even if additional resources were made available for providing basic education and health care to the poor, not much would be achieved unless the capacity to use these resources was significantly improved.
The HEC is focusing on improving the quality of instruction in the country’s colleges and universities, not only on increasing the number of these institutions and their capacity to accommodate more students. The NCHD is making significant efforts to train both officials and people’s representatives at the local level — the bottom tier of the system of governance being developed by the Musharraf government.
I have no doubt that these two initiatives will produce several happy results. They will surely help the country move out of backwardness and proceed towards modernisation. Their impact will become visible slowly since human development takes place not by taking giant leaps but by small steps.
The steps are bound to hit many bumps on the way, some of them placed by those whose narrow interests are threatened by the progress being made. However, the concept behind the work of the Higher Education Commission and the National Commission for Human Development is well developed and based on careful analysis. Both commissions are pursuing big ideas. They need the help and support of all those who are interested in seeing Pakistan leave behind backwardness and break away from the pull of the forces that would like to see the country go back to the dark ages.