ISLAMABAD: State Minister for Education, Training and Standards in Higher Education, Baligh-ur-Rehman on Thursday said the government is determined to improve the education sector through a number of initiatives.
"It is unfortunate that Pakistan is lagging behind the educational targets due to various reasons however the government would bring improvement in this sector by enhancing budget and focussing on improving literacy rate", he said.
The minister stated this while co-chairing the opening session of Need Assessment Conference on "Youth Engagement, Skill Development and Employment Facilitation" with the Chairperson Prime Minister's Youth Programme, Ms Leila Khan.
The session was organized by Prime Minister's Youth Programme and the ministry in collaboration with the United Nations to explore avenues for educating, training, employing and empowering youth at a local hotel.
The minister said "Education is the key to promote harmony in the community resulting in progress, peace and prosperity for the entire nation. It supports democracy, civil and fundamental rights in any country."
He said that we have prepared a National Plan of Action to accelerate the progress towards the educational goals.
The minister said instead of reinventing the wheel there is need to scale up the ongoing programmes in the education sector.
He mentioned two programmes which are running successfully at the moment namely Prime Ministers Youth Training Program and Benazir Bhutto Youth Training Program.
He added that instead of criticizing previous government unnecessarily we should improve the existing programme of the previous governments to excel in the education sector.
Education and character building are two sides of the same coin we can't ignore one side and polish the other, emphasized the minister.
He said that we have finalized the modalities of the Malala fund which would be focusing on the gender parity and would initiate projects to enable girls from the remote areas to have an easy access to the quality education.
He said the government is also focusing on the enhancement of technical and vocational training facilities along with the research and development.
National vocational qualification framework has been finalized and vocational secondary schools would be launched from Grade VI-X very soon.
"Our goal is to increase the budgetary allocation of the education sector in near future provided that our economy and tax to GDP ratio also increase simultaneously," he said.
He added that in our previous tenure our tax to GDP ratio was around 13% and we allocated around 2.6% to the education but unfortunately our government was ousted in undemocratic way and we could not achieve our goals then.
"We have immense potential to grow and improve the socio- economic conditions of our population and there is firmness in us which would help us achieve our targets very soon", he said.
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