Education must on things-to-do list

As fiscal budget draws closer, industrialists along with various other stakeholders are busy presenting their long wish list to the government. Regrettably, however, there are few voices to highlight major problems being faced by the society - primarily education.
All fingers point towards low national spending. Relative to GDP, education spending remained very low, on average 2 percent, during the last decade.
Thats quite low compared to international standards between 14 and 18 percent of GDP, suggested by Unicef, and 6 percent of GNP as recommended by the International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century.
Subsequently, the absence of financial resources has led towards significant weakness in education infrastructure.
Schools in rural areas are few and far between, while they also lack access to basic facilities, including drinking water, electricity, boundary walls, washrooms, text-books and qualified trained teachers.
During the last two decades, just a few thousand primary schools were constructed, which is not sufficient to meet the requirements of a growing population. This is further substantiated by a recent Gallup Pakistan poll, which pointed out that nearly half of the population claims unavailability of schools and colleges in their local area.
Furthermore, various findings revealed that high absenteeism of teachers and students in public sector schools is impeding efforts to improve education. Net enrollment ratio in primary and secondary schools is just 66 percent and 33 percent respectively - way below many Asian developing countries.
Pakistan needs a sustainable education policy in order to fulfill its commitment to achieve literacy rate of 86 percent by the year 2015. Efforts in that direction should step up, considering that Pakistan is off track from achieving its goal of universal primary education by 2015, according to Unescos recently released Global Monitoring Report.
In an earlier report, it made poor education governance responsible for keeping number of children out of school, as nearly 6.5 million children in the age group of five to nine years remained out of schools, according to Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.
Pakistan is recommended to take cue from African countries like Ethiopia and United Republic of Tanzania, where policies such as free schooling, increase in hiring of teachers and construction of schools in underserved areas helped increase enrolment ratio.
To streamline the education sector, the government not only needs to increase national spending on education but it is also required to revamp inactive or ghost schools in villages, increase teacher attendance and trainings to arrest corruption.
Greater investment in education infrastructure is also required in order to fulfill the all important clause of the 18th Amendment - that has made education compulsory for children.
Higher education segment would also require sizeable investments down the line in order to accommodate nearly one-third of the current population, which is currently below age 14.