Rural Education Challenges
The major challenge in the growth of Education is the same as in other rural areas: resources and financials.
Pakistan has historically been a society marked by rather significant disparities among people. Consistent with this social organization, recent studies of Pakistan’s educational system have confirmed a significant imbalance in the access to schooling among children. According to the 1981 Census report, about 54-58 percent of urban men were literate or had some formal education, compared to 15-18 percent of rural males. Even among the more lucky rural men who received some education, few attained an education level higher than primary school. Rural Pakistan’s student/population ratio for primary education is the lowest in South Asia. Such low levels of earned academic capital in rural areas are likely to lead to diminished productivity and higher unemployment rates in those areas as the nonagricultural rural sector grows.
One of the most disqualifying features of these problems is the need for more family resources to ensure attendance and high achievement of their children. The maintenance of children in school requires not only the payment of school fees, however nominal, uniform, or prohibited by the government, but usually also a heavy outlay in the provision of uniforms, books, pencils, and travel endurance for children attending schools outside the village. Even when the expenses are nominal, the loss of children’s work time generally amounts to high and specific costs. The collective result of these obstacles is the reverse sorting of rural children: those from low-income families where child labor costs are generally low are usually the only ones to attend school, and their academic progress is severely hampered.
Searching for the roots of rural education standards uncovers many obstacles that must be surmounted before any meaningful improvement in the state of affairs can occur. The poor condition of the overall economy, and especially the unsatisfactory status of rural incomes combined with the generally low literacy rate in rural areas, acts as a prohibitive barrier, blocking the welfare benefits embodied in the concept of social efficiency in educational provision. The low demand for education perpetuates the problem of insufficient and inadequate educational provision in rural areas.
We are working on the following areas to participate in our role to increase the literacy rate in the area.
