The Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training (MoFEPT) conducted a workshop on out-of-school children (OOSC), wherein it was revealed that roughly 32 percent of the country’s children are not attending any school.
Education Secretaries, Additional Secretaries, Managing Directors (MDs) of educational foundations, and provincial development partners participated in the workshop.
According to the details, the MoFEPT arranged the workshop in order to examine ways to integrate OOSC and grant them their right to free education.
Despite the recent improvements, 32 percent of Pakistani children, which equates to around 20 million girls and boys, are still out of school.
As disclosed in the workshop, some of the OOSC are enrolled in non-formal literacy programs. In this regard, the workshop outlined crucial problems faced by the OOSC in Pakistan, which include, rural and urban inequality, limited access to higher secondary education, flood-induced devastation, household responsibilities, etc.
During his address, Additional Secretary at the Federal Education Ministry, Waseem Ajmal, underscored the Ministry’s promise to fulfill the OOSC’s constitutional right to education.
At the same time, various solutions were recommended at the workshop for mainstreaming the OOSC. For instance, the introduction of daycare at the non-formal education centers, so that their elder siblings, who look after their younger siblings, can also access them.
The Global Partnership for Education (GPE), MoFEPT, and the World Bank (WB) collaborated on this training as part of the COVID-19 Response, Recovery, and Resilience in Education Project (RRREP).