Malala Yousafzai, the youngest Nobel laureate, while addressing the participants of the Oslo Summit on Education for Development made an impassioned plea to world leaders to spend just 8 days’ military budgets on education which would generate 340 billion dollars – sufficient to fund 12 years of education per child on the planet. In her estimate the required money can be raised today if world leaders agree – a stance that challenged the proposed timeline of 15 years – 2030 – to achieve this salutary goal that was agreed by 100 countries in the World Education Forum (WEF) in May 2014.
Malala added: poignantly “the world needs to think bigger and it needs to dream bigger. United Nations’ goals for 2015 wrongly only focused on universal primary schooling. Fifty-nine million children, many in war zones, do not even attend primary school”. While directly addressing the participants of the Oslo summit that included the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, she said: “if nine years of education is not enough for your children, it is not enough for the rest of the world’s children.” If Malala’s plea is heeded by world leaders, and one would assume that her voice above all else is most likely to be heeded, then for the first time in the history of world there would be adequate investment in human capital today and not at some point in future which could well mark a turning point in the economic performance of all economies through enhanced productivity, higher income levels and reduced health costs associated with knowledge of basic hygiene.
In the context of a world where terrorism continues to take a daily toll on human life and physical assets, education may well plug the terrorists’ recruitment drive. Schools are a major target of terrorists, and the carnage at Peshawar Army School epitomized the fear that terrorists have for the future educated generations of this country; girls schools are even more of a target perhaps because terrorists unconsciously recognize that an educated girl can eventually bring a change in the way her entire family operates. Education investment in a country like Pakistan is all the more critical at this stage as the operation Zarb-e-Azb nears completion given that education alone would ensure that terrorists’ recruitment drives remain unsuccessful in future. This has been acknowledged by many studies and by government officials as well as our politicians.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif addressed the Oslo summit as well and stated that education is a priority of his administration and committed to increasing public expenditure on education to four percent of GDP by 2018. Giving praiseworthy targets, recommended by the UN, in the future has been the hallmark of our heads of government and few in the country take his commitment seriously. In addition, education is now devolved to provinces so it is unclear what the Prime Minister was referring to as the federal government has little influence on those provinces where PML-N does not form a government.
Critics argue that Pakistani politicians look at the linkage between higher education levels with higher expectations of delivery from the leadership as the reason for the leadership’s non-focus on the education budget. Others argue that allocation for education has long-term positive political fallout while politicians are more focused on short-term gains like the Metrobus service. Still others note that the focus of allocation by provincial governments on education is on building new schools with cynics maintaining that the reason could well be commissions on construction. However, what must be of major concern to the federal and provincial governments is the existence of a large number of ghost schools where teachers continue to draw salaries but where no one is educated. Thus in our unique case the government needs to improve governance on a priority basis before embarking on allocating a higher percentage of GDP in education – money which may simply be a waste.
