An alarming 22.6 million children in Pakistan are currently out of school. The grim reality of this statistic is that four of ten children leave the education system before the age of 16 without a matriculation certificate, a basic requirement for most employers and all universities.
Leaving school early has lifelong consequences for Pakistan’s youth as it excludes them from skilled professions while the disruption to their education hurts their ability to rejoin the education system.
Aga Khan University’s Institute for Educational Development (IED) is working in partnership to give these out-of-school children and teenagers a way back into the mainstream education system through non-formal basic education. The partners on this project include the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and the Sindh government’s Directorate of Non-Formal Education and Literacy (NFLE).
Non-formal basic education (NFBE) consists of an accelerated curriculum aimed at providing basic numeracy and literacy skills to those outside the formal school system. Lessons take place in local settings such as community centres or homes with mixed classes of students from a variety of ages between five and 16.
The action research project will see researchers from the IED evaluate teaching practices in eight such NFBE centres in marginalised areas of Karachi. Researchers will be much more than observers as they will also suggest improvements in instruction methods to help teachers get the most out of students. The impact of these new approaches will also be analysed so that researchers can determine the teaching, learning and assessment methods which are most suitable for scale-up in other NFBEs across Sindh.
“Teachers will need to adopt different strategies to engage learners of different ages who come from very different backgrounds,” said Dr Dilshad Ashraf, an associate professor at IED. “Our goal is to partner with teachers in class so that we jointly determine the most effective methods to help out-of-school children catch up to their peers.”
The year-long project will see students taught a curriculum developed by the Sindh government’s NFLE, Bureau of Curriculum and Extension Wing and Sindh Textbook Board under the Advancing Quality Alternative Learning project sponsored by JICA. JICA is conducting a similar project in NFBEs in Punjab.
“Pakistan faces a number of challenges in providing access to quality education,” said JICA Education Adviser Ms Chiho Ohashi . “Low literacy levels and large numbers of out-of-school children call for an alternative approach to education. Our study will develop recommendations for improving the NFBE curriculum, teaching-learning materials and teacher training methods. This will inform the development of scalable non-formal education models by state and non-state actors in Pakistan.”
The project’s objectives are in line with global efforts to achieve targets under goal 4 of the Sustainable Development Goals: Quality Education. Targets under the goal call for steps to ensure all boys and girls complete secondary education by 2030 as well as efforts to achieve literacy and numeracy in all youth by 2030.
