Rana Tanveer Hussain, Pakistan’s Minister of Federal Education and Professional Training, made this claim on Friday.
The education minister responded to a query in the National Assembly by saying that 23 million youngsters in Pakistan do in fact attend school.
The minister told the assembly that the government has set a lofty goal of enrolling all 70,000 children in the Islamabad Capital Territory’s public schools by the end of June.
The minister reported that as of today, approximately 70,000 children in Islamabad were not enrolled in school, but that all possible measures were being taken to enroll them by the end of June.
Tanveer announced that the government of Pakistan had begun a program called “Schools on Wheels” to bring education to children in rural areas, and it had begun in Islamabad. Buses were retrofitted to include desks, chalkboards, and even toilets so that they could serve as mobile classrooms.
He added that the ministry planned to provide the same mobile bus facility to children in flood-affected districts of Balochistan and Sindh per Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s orders.
Moreover, he said, the World Bank (WB) had praised the government of Pakistan’s initiative and pledged to donate 30 buses to the good cause.
He stated that the WB planned to implement a similar scheme throughout Africa. He assured the public that the ministry was prepared to help other regions if they supplied transportation in the form of buses.
He explained that the government had not only prioritized remote education but had also launched a tele school system. In addition, he said, the country had launched an accelerated learning initiative with the help of the United Kingdom to boost literacy rates.
When asked about the literacy rate, he responded that it had increased by 0.8% during the previous nine months.
According to UNICEF overall 22.8 million children are out of schools in Pakistan
UNICEF reports that 44 percent of the children between the ages of 5 and 16 are not in school. This amounts to an estimated 22.8 million youngsters.
There are currently 5 million children between the ages of 5 and 9, and another 11.4 million adolescents between the ages of 10 and 14 who are not enrolled in school.
In Sindh, 52% of the poorest children (58%) are not in school; in Balochistan, 78% of girls are not in school. These disparities exist across gender, socioeconomic level, and location.
In primary school, there are over 10.7 million boys and 8.6 million girls, whereas in lower secondary school, there are only 3.6 million boys and 2.8 million girls.
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