NCHD arranges walk to mark International Literacy Day

ISLAMABAD: National Commission for Human Development (NCHD) in collaboration with UNESCO arranged a walk here on Thursday to mark International Literacy Day, highlighting this year's theme "Literacy for Peace".

Hundreds of Children and civil society workers holding placards and banners inscribed with slogans "increase literacy in Pakistan" and "literacy is necessary for peace in Pakistan" participated in the walk, depicting the plight of illiterate people across the country.

Addressing the participants, Chairperson NCHD Dr Nafisa Shah who led the walk, said that inequalities, stigmatization and discrimination linked to wealth, gender, ethnicity, language and location are the curses of illiteracy.

There are currently some 759 million illiterate youth and an adult in the world and the most unfortunate news is the major portion of these illiterates is dwelling on East Asian part of the planet.

The situation of primary education is very disappointing as there are 19 million primary school age children out of which almost half are still out of school.

According to an estimate gross enrollment rate in schools is 70 percent but almost 50 percent children drop out of school before reaching the fifth class. Only one third of the 50 percent pass primary education.

One of the prime mandates of NCHD is to help Pakistan to achieve the Millennium Development Goal-2 by 2015. In order to achieve this goal, the Commission has prioritized "Universal Primary Education", Nafisa said.

She said that half of the population of Pakistan cannot write their names.

Pakistan alone has 50 million illiterates and the major victims of illiteracy are women she said while emphasizing on initiating reforms in educations sector.

She expressed that at present, about half of population of age 10+ in Pakistan is illiterate. Two third rural women cannot read and write.

With respect to literacy, Pakistan is lagging behind other countries of the region.

Director General NCHD Zulfiqar Ahmad has said the status of education of a nation is directly proportional to its poverty and vice-versa. World map of poverty largely coincides with the map of illiteracy.

A literate environment not only improves socio economic indicators in a society, it positively influences systems of governance also.

Literate citizens are motivated to actively participate in decision making processes at local and national levels.

He also told that NCHD is a leading agency for literacy and NCHD has so far established 145,760 Adult Literacy Centers in 134 districts of Pakistan and enrolled more than 3.2 million people (90 percent of them are female).

This programme has also received International Reading Association Literacy Award from UNESCO as one of the best practicing model in the world. NCHD has also established 12000 feeder schools where Poor out of school children are enrolled.

Copyright APP (Associated Press of Pakistan), 2011