Dawood Mamoon, ISS, The Hague
Visiting Research Associate SDPI
In the last two years, Pakistan has witnessed an economic comeback. This year real GDP growth stands at an impressive 8.4 percent, but the vital question is if the growth has been pro poor. Inflation is on a constant rise as well as poverty, which has been elevated to 35 percent of the total population.
Contrary to rhetoric coming out of the government echelons, the official policies in Pakistan still favor the rich against the poor. Pakistan is following a much skewed education policy, with more and more resources are being allocated to higher education, and primary and basic education being ignored.
In comparison to nine billion rupees allocated to the Higher Education Commission, the government has allocated only three billion rupees to the Ministry of Education. The budget for primary education has been increased by a meagre four percent in the last few years. Since higher education is mainly sought by the affluent, more funds for higher education means that the government is providing indirect subsidy to the rich and excluding the poor as they are largely uneducated. The government seems to be ignorant about the bias.
East Asian take-off based on investment in education
Since General Pervez Musharraf took power in 1999, his team has been dedicated to transform Pakistan into another “Asian tiger”, or at least that is what they have claimed. Apparently, they have not learned the lessons the East Asian development experience has taught.
The share of public spending in East Asia on education has been high, compared to, e.g. Latin America. The East Asian countries devoted the largest portion of their educational budgets to primary and secondary rather than to higher education.
Venezuela and South Korea are two contrasting examples. While in the early 1990s Venezuela allocated more than a third of its education budget to higher education, the share represented just eight percent of South Korea’s public expenditure for post-secondary schooling. By giving priority to expanding the quantity of education and improving the quality at the base of the educational pyramid, the East Asian governments stimulated demand for higher education, while relying, to a large extent, on the private sector to satisfy the demand.
It is intriguing to note that already in the 1960s, more than two-thirds of South Korea and Thailand’s population were literate. Even Malaysia had a literacy rate of over 50 percent. On the other hand, in South Asian countries, the total literacy rates were as low as only nine percent for Nepal and 15 percent for Pakistan.
Three decades thereafter, South Korea’s literacy rate is almost hundred percent, and Malaysia managed to achieve a rate of about 90 percent. The same East Asian countries witnessed unprecedented increases in GNP per capita during the same period, e.g. 65 times for South Korea, 13 times for Thailand, and 10 times for Malaysia. In this period, South Asian countries, where literacy rates still remain low, experienced meagre increases of two to five times.
Growing India ignores rural peripheries
Today India is considered a major economic player in Asia. Especially urban India has seen economic prosperity to the likes of Europe and America. One of the most important reasons that our neighbor has made this so far is because the Indian government undertook extensive investments in higher education in late 1970s and 1980s.
Consequently, India transformed a significant portion of its population into highly skilled labor who have been readily employed by the international corporate sector since 1990s, as their wages were much lower than those of the European and US skilled labor. To date, billions of dollars of trade in services has taken place. With current outsourcing trends, India is to gain further from it.
Is India proof of the reverse? Is it tertiary education that matters? However, as good as the macro-picture looks, the reality for a common Indian is different. Since India failed to invest in primary education as it had prioritized higher education, the country is facing severe inequalities.
The rural-urban divide is widening. The plight of common people goes unheard, and the gains of growing India have failed to trickle down to the impoverished. Out of a billion people, only a few millions can claim to be the beneficiaries of Indian economic boom. And they are predominantly the ones who dwell in urban and developed India.
The rural peripheries have been excluded from the development process, as they have been left largely uneducated and unskilled. It came as no surprise in 2004, when the people in India rejected the slogan of “India Shining”, put forward by then ruling party Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), to get another term in office as the party tried to exploit the current success of Indian economy. The 2004 Indian elections were a subtle reminder to the world that all is not well in prospering India: it is following a skill biased economic transformation, rather than a complete and overall progression to development.
Thus, India and Pakistan have followed a higher education focused policies. They equally witness widening urban-rural and socio-economic divides between high level of inequalities linked to their growth experience. On the other hand, East Asia has followed a balanced education policy whereby giving priority to primary education by expanding the quantity and improving the quality at the base. As a result, they have emerged as “Asian Tigers”, achieving high growth rates amid poverty alleviation. The best part is that the effects of economic progress in East Asia have been relatively equally distributed between different strata of the society.
Universal and quality education: two sides of a coin
In a nutshell, the road to people-friendly growth is paved with universal education. However, the first challenge is to provide universal education. The second is to improve the quality of education in existing as well as newly built state and private run education institutes.
For the poor in Pakistan, the alternatives to sending their children to low quality public schools are much more attractive than the benefits of educating their children. It is evident from the high rates of dropouts prevalent in Pakistan as well as the trends in child labor.
In Pakistan, 50 percent of children drop out of school before completing primary school. A recent study revealed that 96 percent of the teachers and 86 percent of students of public schools in Rawalpindi city believe that reasons behind the dropouts is the weakness of primary schools. It implies poor quality, shortage, non-availability and poor training of teachers, tiny classrooms, untrained teachers, economic inequalities, poverty, and fewer chances of employment after education.
The overwhelming majority attributed student dropout rates to the standard of class fellows of rich families. It underlines that increasing inequalities negatively affect education level in Pakistan. Overall results in education remain disappointing because of the increasing disparities between the poor and the rich, and the educational rural-urban divide.
At 65 percent, Pakistan’s net primary enrollment rate is well below its neighbors in South Asia, such as in Bangladesh 75 percent, India 77 percent, and close to 100 percent in Sri-Lanka.
The first right step towards a successful education policy is to adopt a balanced education policy whereby higher education is not promoted at the cost of primary education. Secondly and most importantly, the government needs to allocate sufficient funds to education sector.
Only with adequate amount of funds, Pakistan can pursue a balanced education policy to ensure quality and access. This is the only way the poor in Pakistan have a chance to change their destiny.
The government has to revise its budgetary priorities. It needs to curtail the defense expenditure to give more resources to the development sector. The government needs to decide whether well-educated population is a better strategic asset or a hugely inflated army if we have to make any real progress towards human development in Pakistan.
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