Pakistan’s new education policy

Raza Rumi responds to the new education policy for Pakistan

Yet another educational policy has been announced for Pakistan and its hapless citizens. We should not cast aspersions on the motives of an elected government, for we have been bitten by endless rounds of authoritarian rule which have not only destroyed the institutions of civilian governance, but have also demolished the integrity of our curriculum and mode of instruction. Decade after decade, dictators chose to glorify martial rule and later legitimized the abuse of jihad and violence. Even those who have studied at elite, expensive schools have somehow been doctored by the same curse of malicious textbooks. The surreal curricula have glorified looters and plunderers like Mahmud Ghaznavi only because they happened to be Muslims by a sheer coincidence of birth. Not to mention the Hindus, with whom we have coexisted for nearly a thousand years; they have been painted as treacherous, villainous and vile creatures ready to destroy the Muslims.
One would have expected that a legitimately elected government, representing the aspirations and pluralism of Pakistan’s small provinces would take a strong stance on the revision of pernicious curricula. Alas, this is now a distant, buried dream for all. The policy is silent on that. This is a government that is waging wars on terrorism rather successfully and with clarity of purpose, but the educational policy makes little mention of the madrassa reform which is now an imperative for the very survival of Pakistan as a viable state. Thousands of madrassas scattered all over the place, funded by external powers preach hatred, bigotry and a reversion to the Dark Ages. Who will reform these madrassas if the national education policy does not even bother to lay out a strategy and provide resources? The new policy promises that by 2015, the budgetary allocation for education would increase to seven percent of the GDP from the current 2.1 percent of the GDP. This is surely promising but how can a policy not envision the need or the strategy to mobilize such resources? Have we not heard such sanguine proclamations in the past?

Read the full article here

Assessment Of Corruption In Afghanistan

‘Assessment Of Corruption In Afghanistan‘, United States Agency for International Development, March 2009

EXCERPT: “USAID/Afghanistan commissioned an assessment to provide a strategy, program options, and recommendations on needs and opportunities to strengthen the capacity and political will of the Government of Afghanistan to fulfill its National Anti-Corruption Strategy. This report thus assesses the issue of corruption in the country, the legal and institutional frameworks for combating corruption, as well as USAID, USG and other donor activities against corruption,

1.4 billion are still very poor

The World Bank’s has published new poverty figures and revisited the $1 poverty line and set a $1.25 poverty line according to 2005 prices.

On the basis of the new poverty line, 1.4 billion very poor people live in this world, of which 337 million live in East Asia and 596 million in South Asia. The Asian continent is the home for more than two thirds of the World’s poor.

POVERTY: World Bank report on poverty, including India’s

Source: POVERTY: World Bank report on poverty, including India’s

The World Bank has released a new report on poverty. From the press release:

New data show 1.4 billion live on less than $1.25 a day, but progress against poverty remains strong

WASHINGTON, DC, August 26, 2008 – The World Bank said improved economic estimates showed there were more poor people around the world than previously thought while also revealing big successes in the fight to overcome extreme poverty.

The new estimates, which reflect improvements in internationally comparable price data, offer a much more accurate picture of the cost of living in developing countries and set a new poverty line of US$1.25 a day. They are based on the results of the 2005 International Comparison Program (ICP), released earlier this year.

Pakistan’s education performance poorest in Asia

Mohsin Babbar (The POST)

ISLAMABAD: Despite getting ample funding from International Financial Institutions (IFIs) for education sector reforms in the country, Pakistan is rated as poorest performer among all the Asian countries receiving funding from Asian Development Bank (ADB).

Ranked at 120 as a whole, Pakistan has shown an extremely poor performance in almost all indicators of education sector, suggest an ADB report entitled “Education and Skills: Strategies for Accelerated Development in Asia and the Pacific”.

According to the EFA Development Index and its Components in ADB developing member countries, Pakistan’s EDI rate was 0.64, the lowest in the region, while Kazakhstan was leading with 0.992. Even India, Bangladesh, Nepal has better rates with 0.797, 0.759 and 0.734, respectively.

In ASIA, water progresses as sanitation regresses

“The world’s poorest nations are making halting progress in water, but little or no tangible improvement in sanitation — two of the basic necessities of life. The U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals, which seek to reduce extreme poverty and hunger by 50 percent by 2015, has also set a target of halving the proportion of people without access to basic sanitation.

But this goal may never be reached unless at least 10 billion dollars are invested every year, through 2015, to improve sanitation worldwide, according to the Stockholm International Water Institute. It is hard for policy makers and opinion leaders to imagine how unsafe — not to mention embarrassing — it is to relieve oneself in public, in the middle of the street, or for women in rural areas waiting for sunset to find a bush or faraway field, with high risks of physical assault or rape.”

Full story: http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=43595

Asia beset by petty corruption: UN

* UNDP report says small-scale corruption limits poor’s access to education and basic health services
* Says natural resources being destroyed by illegal activity

JAKARTA: A few hundred baht here, a few thousand rupees there – a major United Nations report released on Thursday said “petty corruption” is a massive drain on Asian economic growth and hits the poor hardest.

The sort of bribes many Asians pay as a matter of course are worsening child mortality rates and perpetuating poverty across the region, the report said.

“Petty corruption is a misnomer,” said Anuradha Rajivan, who led the team that compiled the UN Development Programme (UNDP) report, titled “Tackling Corruption, Transforming Lives”.

“Dollar amounts may be relatively small but the demands are incessant, the number of people affected is enormous and the share of poor people’s income diverted to corruption is high,” she said, adding that too much attention focused on the “big fish” in anti-corruption drives and not on the low-level vice that affects countless Asians daily.

“Hauling the rich and powerful before the courts may grab headlines but the poor will benefit more from efforts to eliminate the corruption that plagues their everyday lives,” she said.

Global survey reveals growing anger over social inequality

By Bill Van Auken
20 May 2008

The unprecedented accumulation of wealth by a narrow financial elite under conditions of declining real incomes for the vast majority of the world’s population is creating mounting discontent and anger.

This is the significance of a poll conducted across Europe, Asia and the United States by the Financial Times of London and the Harris polling firm.

“Income inequality has emerged as a highly contentious political issue in many countries as the latest wave of globalization has created a ‘superclass’ of rich people,” the Financial Times commented in relation to the poll results, which were published Monday.

The FT/Harris poll found overwhelming majorities throughout Europe expressing the view that the social chasm between the financial elite and the rest of the population has grown too large. In Spain, for example, 76 percent said that social inequality had grown too great, while in Germany the figure was 87 percent.

In China, which has become the low-wage manufacturing center of the world, subjecting millions of workers to exploitation while producing a new class of billionaires and multi-millionaires, 80 percent said that inequality in income was too great.

World’s warehouse for illegal organs

Source: Hindustan Times

“Illegal organ trafficking accounts for as much as 10 percent of all transplants worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. In the last two decades, Asia had made up a large share of this flourishing black market. Promising quick, easy and cheap procurement of life-saving organs to foreigners who see it as their last hope, the region witnesses billions of dollars changing hands every month among iniquitous brokers, desperate patients, poverty-stricken donors and dishonest doctors.

In fact, 90 percent of the donors in the region come from below the poverty line and 90 percent of these donors agree to donate only to ease their financial troubles. Until 2006, China was the top host country for transplants. However, recently tightened regulations may change this. In the absence of less developed medical facilities and the presence of a porous Indo-Nepal border, many Nepalese people come to India to score a better deal for their kidney or liver.”

Full story here

AIDS killing more Nepalese women

By Surya B. Prasai

February 16, 2008

Nepal has just started recovering from the devastation of a civil conflict which in the past decade killed nearly 13,600 lives. The other big conflict that now occupies the mind of the donor community helping Nepal at large is AIDS which is expected to take away 15,000 Nepali lives each year for the next decade, which in ratio roughly comes to an alarming 11 people dying for every person killed in the civil conflict. According to the UNDP website You and AIDS, Nepal hardly has the resources to fight the disease. International aid agencies such as USAID which have contributed tremendously to the efforts of the Nepal Government since 1993, sometimes feel the resource crunch even though American funding has been generous amounting to roughly US $ 20 million a year to the poor Himalayan Kingdom. The sad part of the story is that the larger percentage of deaths in future is going to be Nepali women, who account for nearly 60% of Nepal´s labour force in the agricultural sector.In South Asia, Nepal certainly tops in the number of returning commercial female sex workers infected with AIDS in 2008. Of nearly 45% of 100,000 back from Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and Bangalore Madras, various Nepali INGOs have estimated that 30% have already died, about half are married to Nepali husbands, and the remaining are working in the Kathmandu and city concentric commercial sex business in the form of massage parlours, cabin restaurants, lodges, hotels, dance restaurants, bhattis (drinking spots) and road side restaurants on highways. The total number of Nepali commercial sex workers, all of them female, is nearly 250,000 in India´s major cities. Commercial sex is easily available in Nepal, in a country which has a shortage of condoms. In the rest of South Asia too, the growing and continuing challenge of defeating AIDS has become more concentrated in women where increasing rates of infection have shown more women innocently succumbing to infections due to a lack of effective strategic and behavioral change communications interventions, weak national HIV/AIDS prevention and control strategies, porous commitment among donors and inability to concentrate on the problem as a sectoral priority which needs to be tackled with financial and AIDS prevention knowledge bank resources.

For full text click the author’s name above.