Despite multiple federal and international grants and programs, 1.97 billion dollars between 1997 and 2012, the literacy rate in Pakistan has only slightly improved in that time. Today, over half of the country’s children aged 5-to-16 lack access to basic education. In 1998, only 42.7 percent of Pakistanis has received an education; over twenty years later the rate has only risen to 46 percent.
Khusro Pervez, Director General of the National Commission for Human Development (NCHD), a non-profit group that focuses on education, says, “Education has never been a national priority.” Azman Khan and Myra Iqbal from Reuters captures the problem as this: “since independence in 1947, Pakistan has seen seven national education policies, eight five-year-plans and about half a dozen other education schemes. Yet the results are dismal.”
Kaiser Bengali, an education expert from the government after government has abandoned the policies of the previous administration and adopted new and even loftier targets, wreaking havoc on the education system and squandering millions of dollars.”
Additionally, Pakistan’s education system is full of corruption. In 2011, The Supreme Court heard a case of 66 billion rupees levied in a special education tax between 1985 and 1995 but never used for schools. Additionally, in 2013, Transparency International found that 43 percent of Pakistanis surveyed viewed the education system as corrupt or highly corrupt. While the progress in Pakistan seems slow and dismal, Pakistan’s federal education budget for 2013 is 17 percent higher than last year and the government has honored “its pledge to double the education budget and keep its eyes glued on the target.”
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Written by Aanchal Narang