Zubair Qureshi
A new report, “Bringing All the Girls to School – A Case for Investment,” jointly published by a group of civil society organizations working on girls’ right to education in Pakistan states that the government will have to make an investment to the tune of Rs6.5 trillion to ensure that every out-of-school (OOS) girl in the country has access to formal education by the year 2030.
To ensure that the entire population of all the out-of-school children in Pakistan, girls and boys, are in schools another Rs5.5 trillion will have to be invested in the education sector over the next 10 years.
It is interesting to note that between 2012-13 to 2018-19, the federal and provincial governments in Pakistan collectively spent Rs6 trillion on education and as per the projections provided in the report, this amount will merely have to double over a ten-year period to achieve hundred per cent literacy in the country.
At present, 22.8 million or 44% of Pakistan’s children of school-going age (i.e. 5 – 16 years) are out of schools. The majority of these out-of-school children are girls.This inevitably means that Pakistan can possibly not overcome its current education crises without ensuring formal learning opportunities for its girl-children.
Over the period of the last five years from 2012-13 to 2016-17, the number of out-of-school children (boys and girls) has declined by approximately 12 per cent.
