Razina Alam commended decrease in out of school children

ISLAMABAD, Jan 4 (APP): Chairperson National Commission for Human Development (NCHD), former Senator Razina Alam Khan Wednesday
said the decrease in number of out of school children in Pakistan was encouraging and effort of all the stakeholders in this national service was commendable.
Addressing senior managers of NCHD here in a meeting to review the working of the organization, she said two million reduction in the out of school children was though not very high but the trend was satisfying, said a news release.
“We have to work harder and faster, especially in the remote areas to enhance enrollment of children and literacy rate in the country” she remarked.
Razina Alam said during last year NCHD enrolled 82,166 children from the remote areas in 5,949 feeder schools where 6,581 teachers were imparting multigrade teaching to 310,146 students.
Community feeder schools were established keeping in view the access and quality education to the underprivileged and marginalized community in the remote areas of the country, she informed.
She was of the view that when education facilities would be provided at the door step of the community, enrollment rate would increase and drop out ratio will decrease, and the people allow their girls too to study in their nearby vicinity.
Since 2010 NCHD had mainstreamed 476,241 students in Government schools, she added.
To meet the targets of vision 2025 and the global commitment of Sustainable Development Goals, we will strive to achieve 90% literacy & 100% enrollment of the children, which is a gigantic task and we have to meet challenges through vision, planning and execution with hard work, she maintained.
While discussing the achievements of the previous year, she
said that NCHD remained an important partner of the education ministry in the field of literacy and non formal education and launched many new initiates to meet national and international commitments for education.
She observed that, PML N Government has initiated “Literate Islamabad Project” as a model to improve and enhance education situation in
the country.
In this connection NCHD had recently launched Non formal Education Project in collaboration with JICA, she said.
Fifty model non formal schools are being established for the age group of 8 to 14 years in Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT), she informed.
Mainstreaming of Madaris by introducing primary education was another innovative initiative of NCHD, which was functional in 100 Madaris of Islamabad, AJ&K, GB and FATA under Federal Ministry of Education and
Professional Training, she added.
She was of the view that, strategies aimed at equalizing opportunity in education for girls would help us to increase our literacy rate as out of 57 million illiterates 70% are women and out of 24 million out of school children 51% are girls. NCHD have launched a Literacy Movement in the name of “Each One Teach One”, she said.
Launching of Jail Literacy Project was another initiate of NCHD of the year 2016, in order to cater with the huge number of illiterates
in the jails, she observed.
She informed that overall progress towards Universal Primary Education (UPE) in the country during last 3 years was encouraging.
School facilities like toilets have increased from 28% to 33% , number of out of school children had reduced to 24 million from 26 million, and advances on many fronts have been made for enhancing education in the country, demonstrating that national leadership and good policies make a difference, she viewed.
“I would like to inform you all that in 2016, Planning and Development Reforms Department, have conducted third party validation of our education programs and it is important to note that all NCHD feeder schools were found functional and reports were satisfactory which reflects hard work of its staff.