New DG shares his vision to address illiteracy issues, uplift of unprivileged classes
Zubair Qureshi
National Commission for Human Development (NCHD) has a strong infrastructure at grass root level covering 114 districts all over the country and the government can utilize this huge human resource, especially 36,000 volunteers for awareness campaign regarding COVID-19 in the country
These views were expressed by the newly appointed Director General (DG) of the NCHD, Hassan Baig during a meeting with the media persons. The meeting held in a cordial atmosphere and in line with the given Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for prevention of coronavirus.
We have devised a strategy for plantation across the country to contribute to Clean & Green Pakistan, said the DG adding, the NCHD had the capacity to plant 36,000,000 saplings in a year.
He stressed the need to adopt vibrant and viable approaches involving all the stakeholders including NGOs, INGOs and donors for the noble cause. He directed to devise strategy to conduct different surveys as most of the NGOs and Government agencies outsource their surveys to make NCHD self sustainable.
He said we need to devise policies which could address the causes such as social inequality, gender disparities, ethnic and linguistic disadvantages, and gaps between geographic areas.
Providing an equal education opportunity in the remote areas is the basic right of all the citizens of the country, he stressed. Providing free and compulsory education to the poorest which is engrained with good quality will make sense, while flexible approaches towards learning and multi-grade teaching through Non-formal education in remote areas that can cut the cost and is most effective in the under-developed countries.
He said, NCHD had adopted a two-pronged approach to address the issues of illiteracy in the country, Adult Literacy (for age group 14 and above) and Primary Education both Formal Education (for age group 5-9) and Non-Formal education (for age group 10-14) to achieve 90% literacy rate in the country.
NCHD has contributed to providing literacy to 3.96 million since its inception and providing education to 335,164 children in NCHD funded 5,949 Feeder Schools in remote areas to the marginalized group, she briefed.
Hassan Baig is MPhil in Economics from Quaid-e-Azam University and has earlier at various top positions in civil services of Pakistan including Additional Chief Secretary Azad Jammu and Kashmir Government, Joint Secretary Aviation, Joint Secretary Science & Technology, Director General of the Civil Aviation Authority, DG Pakistan HALAL Authority, Deputy Secretary FIA Ministry of Interior, Deputy Secretary Projects Establishment Division, Community Welfare Attache/Counselor, Embassy of Pakistan, Tripoli (Libya), Assistant Commissioner Income Tax, as well as Executive District Officer (Community Development)/Finance Rawalpindi.
He said NCHD had approached the seminaries for reforms and introduced primary education along with religious education in order to bring them in the mainstream of higher education.
Currently we are successfully working in 100 seminaries of ex-FATA areas, AJ&K, GB and ICT. In collaboration with JICA we had launched a model of Non-formal School system where 20 schools are functional in order to provide education to the children of age 10-14 who could neither be admitted to the primary schools nor belonged to adult literacy.