Comment by Riaz Haq on October 25, 2013 at 6:09pm

Here's an AP report on private school enrollment growth in Pakistan:

Pakistan is seeing a surge in private schools, a trend some find hopeful in a country where the government education system is decrepit and the other alternative is religious schools, known here as madrasas, which offer little education beyond memorizing the Quran and are seen as one source of Islamic militancy.

The U.S., for one, says it plans to invest in private schools as part of a multibillion-dollar aid package designed to erode extremism in the nuclear-armed country battered by Taliban attacks.

"The quality of education in the public sector is deteriorating day by day," said T.M. Qureshi, a Ministry of Education official. "When there's a vacuum of quality, someone will fill it."

According to UNESCO figures, Pakistan spends 2.9 percent of its gross domestic product on education, slightly less than India's 3.2 percent and well below the U.S.'s 5.2 percent.

One reason education has historically been a low priority for Pakistani governments, experts say, is that the governing elite can afford to send their children to the best private schools or to academies abroad. Another, the experts say, is the feudal structures in the rural areas that give landowners an incentive to keep farm workers uneducated and submissive.

Only around half of Pakistani adults can read, schools often lack basic amenities like water, teachers get away with absences, and the bureaucracy is cumbersome.

But since the mid-1990s, small, inexpensive private schools, once an urban phenomenon, have been sprouting in earnest in the poorer countryside, offering relatively affordable tuition, according to a 2008 World Bank report.

Between 2000 and 2005, their number grew from 32,000 to 47,000, the report said. More recent Pakistani government statistics put the figure at more than 58,000. Around one-third of Pakistan's 33 million students attend a range of private schools, far more than the 1.6 million in the 12,000 madrasas.

The private schools tend to outperform their government peers academically, though generally speaking, standards are low across the board, said Tahir Andrabi, an economics professor at Pomona College in California who has studied the trend.

In the big picture, proponents of private schools echo the argument for charter schools in the U.S. — that they can make schools better and children more educated, and in Pakistan's case dent poverty and the appeal of extremism.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/2009/11/07/pakistan-sees-surge-in-priv...

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 25, 2013 at 7:32pm

Here's an excerpt of William Dalrymple's Op Ed on Malala in NY Times:

Malala’s extraordinary bravery and commitment to peace and the education of women is indeed inspiring. But there is something disturbing about the outpouring of praise: the implication that Malala is a lone voice, almost a freak event in Pashtun society, which spans the border areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan and is usually perceived as ultraconservative and super-patriarchal.

Few understand the degree to which the stereotypes that bedevil the region — images of terrorist hide-outs and tribal blood feuds, religious fanatics and the oppression of women — are, if not wholly misleading, then at least only one side of a complex society that was, for many years, a center of Gandhian nonviolent resistance against British rule, and remains home to ancient traditions of mystic poetry, Sufi music and strong female leaders.

While writing a history of the first Western colonial intrusion into the region, I heard many stories about the woman Malala Yousafzai is named after: Malalai of Maiwand. For most Pashtuns, the name conjures up not a brave teenage supporter of education, but an equally brave teenage heroine who turned the tide of a crucial battle during the second Anglo-Afghan war.

Malalai does not appear in any British account of the Battle of Maiwand, but if Afghan sources are accurate, her actions led to the British Empire’s greatest defeat in a pitched battle in the course of the 19th century.

According to Pashtun oral tradition, when, on July 27, 1880, a British force was surprised by a much larger Pashtun levy, the British initially made use of their superior artillery and drove back the Afghans. It was only when Malalai took to the battlefield that things changed. Seeing her fiancé cowed by a volley of British cannon fire, she grabbed a fallen flag — or in some versions her veil — and recited the verse: “My lover, if you are martyred in the Battle of Maiwand, I will make a coffin for you from the tresses of my hair.” In the end, it was Malalai who was martyred, and her grave became a place of pilgrimage.

Malalai was not alone. The more I read the Pashtun sources for the Anglo-Afghan wars, rather than the British ones, the more I saw that prominent women were in the story.

The Afghan monarch at the turn of the 19th century, Shah Shuja ul-Mulk — a direct tribal forebear of President Hamid Karzai — was married to a Pashtun woman, Wafa Begum, who most contemporaries judged to be the real power behind the monarchy. (The British praised her for her “coolness and intrepidity.”) When the shah was overthrown and imprisoned in Kashmir, his wife negotiated his release in return for his most valuable possession, the Koh-i-Noor diamond, the largest in the world.

She then played a crucial role in freeing him from a second captivity in Lahore. She helped organize an elaborate escape plan involving a tunnel, a sewer, a boat and a succession of horses. Wafa Begum later charmed the British into giving her asylum, thus providing members of her dynasty with the base from which they would eventually return to their throne in Kabul. She died in 1838, just before the British put her husband back on the Afghan throne. Many have attributed the ultimate failure of that enterprise to the absence of her strategic good sense.
------------
We owe it to Malala and many others who share her ideals to refuse to allow the radicals to win the battle of perceptions. It is, and has always been, possible to be a Muslim Pashtun and to embrace nonviolence and a prominent role for women in public affairs. Indeed the greatest weapon we have in the war on terrorism in that region is the courage and the decency of the vast proportion of the people who live there.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/26/opinion/international/malalas-bra...

Comment by Riaz Haq on April 1, 2014 at 10:44am

Here's a BR story on tripling of private schools in Pakistan to 69,000:

With increasing in fiscal pressure, growing un-met demand for education, weak management of the public education system, and poor quality perception of the public schools, there is a structural gap on the supply side, revealed a report Access to Finance (A2F) for Low Cost Private Schools (LCPS).

Department for International Development (DFID) funded, Ilm Ideas Programme launched a study on Access to Finance for Low Cost Private Schools in partnership with Pakistan Microfinance Network here on Monday. The A2F for the LCPS report revealed that Pakistan's education industry provides a classic impact investment opportunity for private sector finance. Until now, the public sector has been playing a dominant role in the education industry. However, with increasing fiscal pressures, growing un-met demand for education, weak management of the public education system, and poor quality perception of the public schools there is a structural gap on the supply side. The report further states that given the scale the large number of out of school children and poor performance on international education indicators, there is a strong case for private sector intervention at the service delivery level either under a public-private partnership framework and/or on its own.

The number of private schools in Pakistan has multiplied to almost three folds - at a much faster rate than the number of public sector schools. Most of this growth has been within low cost private schools which now account for about one third of school enrolment in Pakistan. The study on 'A2F for LCPS' reports that there are currently over 69,000 low cost private schools in the country and is emerging as a key ancillary tool for improving enrolment rates and the quality of schooling in Pakistan.

Addressing on this occasion, Richard Montgomery Head of the UK's Department for International Development in Pakistan said that this innovative initiative would potentially help low cost private schools to access finance for the first time, which could enable them to invest in improving the quality of the education they provide, and expand access so that even more children can go to school. Given that Pakistan's population of 185 million will mushroom by half again within the next 40 years, innovative ideas like this will help ensure the burgeoning youth population is well educated and able to bring prosperity and stability to the country, Montgomery added.

Ross Ferguson Private Sector Development Advisor at UK's Department for International Development said that according to an estimate, LCPS sector needs over Rs 100 billion to fund existing expansion plans to support access to finance linked to investment in quality which can help raise both enrolment and learning outcomes. To achieve this education and the finance sectors must work together and the DFID is ready to support these partnerships, Ferguson added.

Panellists including representatives of Punjab Education Foundation, Education Foundation for Sindh, Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund, State Bank Pakistan, Khushali Bank, Kashf Foundation and First Microfinance Bank presented their views on exploring the full potential of the low cost private school sector with a view to enhancing access to credit and investment in quality solutions to improve operations, governance and overall quality of services the LCPS sector provides. A large number of people including donors, public and private sectors organisations from the education and finance sectors, school administrators and education service providers participated in the launching ceremony.

http://www.brecorder.com/general-news/172/1168383/

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 8, 2014 at 8:06pm

Arundhati Roy’s charm and lucidity have iconized her in the world of left-wing politics. But, asked by Laura Flanders what she made of the 2014 Nobel Prize, she appeared to be swallowing a live frog: “Well, look, it is a difficult thing to talk about because Malala is a brave girl and I think she has even recently started speaking out against the US invasions and bombings…but she’s only a kid you know and she cannot be faulted for what she did….the great game is going on…they pick out people [for the Nobel Prize].” For one who has championed peoples causes everywhere so wonderfully well these shallow, patronizing remarks were disappointing.

Farzana Versey, Mumbai based left-wing author and activist, was still less generous. Describing Malala as “a cocooned marionette” hoisted upon the well-meaning but unwary, Versey lashes out at her for, among other things, raising the problem of child labor at her speech at the United Nations: “it did not strike her that she is now even more a victim of it, albeit in the sanitized environs of an acceptable intellectual striptease.”

http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Why-does-Malala-Yusufzais-...

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 11, 2014 at 5:08pm

The Promise of Pakistan’s Private Schools

Through market-driven schools, young Pakistani women are gaining access to opportunity. 

By  Tahir Andrabi

Dec. 11, 2014 11:59 a.m. ET , Wall Street Journal

When 17-year-old Malala Yousafzai accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on Wednesday, the accompanying pomp and press coverage helped rekindle a global fascination with the fearless young Pakistani activist who was shot and wounded after speaking out against Taliban attacks on girls’ schools.

Back home in Pakistan, the international attention has only fed the polarized opinion surrounding Ms. Yousafzai, beloved by some and derided as a pawn of the West by others.

But to single out Ms. Yousafzai as either a national hero or tool of foreign influence is to miss the real story. After working as a field researcher in Pakistan for a decade, it’s become clear to me that Ms. Yousafzai represents a new generation in Pakistan, where an estimated 50 million children are of primary-school age. For the first time in the nation’s history, more girls—63%—of primary-school age are in school than not, even as they face Taliban and other extremist threats, and even amidst an ongoing national crisis of leadership.

Girls in every corner of Pakistan, including those bordering the tribal areas and in Ms. Yousafzai’s northwest home district of Swat, are not only passing high-school exit exams at a higher rate than boys, they also consistently rank among the top students in these exams. In the most recent rounds of admissions to medical and dental schools, Pakistani girls made up 70% of the successful candidates.

The most striking change in the educational landscape feeding this phenomenon is the tremendous growth in low-cost private schools and not, as is commonly believed, in religious schools, or madrassas. This is confirmed by surveys, by government data and now by an increasing body of my own team’s field research. Their growth is fastest in the rural areas, including the Pashtun belt, and their numbers increased to more than 70,000 in 2011 from 36,000 in 1999—with no signs of a slowdown. Today they account for almost 40% of enrollment of the country’s youth. In fact, Ms. Yousafzai’s father started one such school—the Khushal School and College—in Swat in the 1990s.

This phenomenon first began after the denationalization of schools and colleges in the 1980s, allowing a critical mass of modestly educated young women, which had emerged due to government investments in secondary schooling, to serve as teachers in these schools. Today these mom-and-pop-run schools are market driven, fiercely competitive and teach a mainstream curriculum focusing on languages and math. Staffed overwhelmingly with local female teachers and bereft of any organized support from foreign-aid donors or the Pakistani government, these schools outperform their public counterparts (admittedly a low bar) on learning outcomes by a wide margin—equivalent to one year’s worth of learning by grade five. And tuition is only about $2 a month, making the schools affordable to many families dependent on daily wage labor of about $2 per day—the nation’s poverty line.

In surveys conducted in poor rural areas by the research team to which I belong, Pakistani parents exhibit little gender bias in their belief in girls’ abilities to succeed academically. In carefully conducted field experiments, rural families tend to show high aspirations for their girls when told of the increasing performance of girls in urban areas. What also stands out in these surveys is how the aspirations of Pakistani parents are indistinguishable from those in similarly developed countries across Asia and Africa.

Pakistan is a large, complex country, and there is danger in pushing any single narrative too far. Having focused mainly on providing basic education to the poorer segments of society, the private-school market now faces the challenge of providing quality education to the upper grades while keeping costs low. The need is there: Public-school governance remains in a shambles, and dropout rates are high in low-achieving schools. But long-term transformation will require a shift in the state’s orientation from security and patronage toward focusing on providing jobs and educational opportunities for this emerging generation. Strong norms against women in the workplace and social pressures on girls to marry early still exist. The country’s leadership, consisting primarily of older men, may resist change.

And I know all too well Pakistan’s history: Benazir Bhutto, the other iconic female figure from Pakistan, was assassinated by extremists in 2007.

But the growing number of educated girls and young women are critical to Pakistan’s hopes for a successful future, and they will not willingly turn back to the past. Today, as girls finally get the chance to advance through education, there are truly millions of Malalas.

Mr. Andrabi is the Stedman-Sumner professor of economics at Pomona College in Claremont, California.

Link to the article (requires subscription) http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-promise-of-pakistans-private-school...

 Pomona College Website Summary: http://www.pomona.edu/news/2014/12/11-andrabi-wall-street-journal.aspx

Comment by Riaz Haq on February 5, 2016 at 7:19am

#Pakistan defies West's stereotypes of #Muslims: More #girls in #Pakistan colleges than boys. #MalalaYousafzai http://wpo.st/a0H91 

Malala is made to tell a particular story about people in the global South, generally, and Pakistan, specifically.

She is represented as the girl who defied the culture in Pakistan, and who now embodies a transnational, secular modernity exemplified by her emphasis on independence, choice, advocacy for freedom, and arguments for gender equality.

Instead of being a symbol of the courage of Muslims and Pakistanis to stand up against local forms of violence, Malala is presented as an exception.

This narrative of Malala sustains the façade of Islam as an oppressive religion and Muslims as embroiled in pre-modern sensibilities.

Transnational girls’ education campaigns, such as the Nike Foundation’s “Girl Effect” and the White House’s “Let Girls Learn,” similarly paint a picture of black and brown populations as pre-modern, and still not educating girls. They call on the feminist sensibilities of benevolent citizens to save their Muslim sisters.

Such formulations, however, not only re-articulate the binary of victim/heroine, but also abstract education from a complex web of issues such as state corruption, the hollowed-out welfare system, and lack of access to jobs, among others.

In the case of Pakistan, for instance, research shows that girls are in school; in fact, there are more girls in higher education than boys!

Girls’ education – or, lack thereof – thus, has become a way in which Western institutions have established their own superiority and, simultaneously, the inferiority of Islam and Muslims, deeming interventions necessary and even ethically imperative.

In the context of these deep and emotional attachments to girls and education, girls who advocate for education (like Malala) and the school infrastructure itself have become prominent targets for extremists as a means to express their anti-West, anti-United States and anti-Pakistan sentiments.

It enables them to strike at the heart of what liberal global North deems as its most prized project.

Importantly, the extremists represent their attacks as a continuation of their fight against what they perceive to be colonial and foreign influence – mass schooling in Pakistan being a legacy of the British colonizers who displaced local, indigenous traditions and systems of learning.

This is a serious critique that we must take into account if we hope to curb this war on education.

It is time, therefore, that we scrutinize the loud debate over girls’ education and dislodge the monopoly of Western perspective on it, thereby making it a less potent site for extremists.

A critical way in which we can further both these ends is by recognizing the long traditions of learning that are indigenous to Muslims and Pakistan, attending to the areas and systems of support identified by girls themselves, as well as supporting organizations such as the Aga Khan Development Network, which ground their efforts in their Muslim ethics and seek to improve the quality of life of populations in Pakistan (and beyond).


Doing so will not only allow us to further our efforts for global education, but make space for alternative traditions and recognize humanity’s many histories.

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 21, 2016 at 9:16pm

School Quality, School Cost, and the Public/Private School Choices
of Low-Income Households in Pakistan
Harold Aldermana
Peter F. Orazemb
Elizabeth M. Patern


Given the deliberate concentration on low income neighborhoods, the
sample strategy identified a large number of low income households. Fifty-five percent of the
sampled children are in households earning less than 3,500 rupees ($100) per month,
corresponding to below $1 per person per day. Despite the low incomes, a surprisingly large
proportion of children is in school. Only 11 percent of the boys and 8 percent of the girls aged
6-10 were not enrolled. However, the probability of withholding a child from school drops
rapidly as income rises. The lowest income households withheld 25 percent of their boys and 21 
12
percent of their girls from school. In contrast, almost all children in households earning above
Rs 3500 are in school.
Not only is enrollment high, a high share of children is enrolled in private schools, even
children from the poorest families. Only in the poorest category in table 1 is the share of
children in government schools greater than in private schools, and then only barely so. As
household income increases, the share of children in private school increases dramatically.
Similar findings of extensive use of private schools by poor families in Karachi (Kardar 1995).
The high proportion of children in private schools is even more surprising, given the
share of household income that must be sacrificed. Even though the amount spent per child rises
with income, the share of income spent declines. In addition, for the lowest income households,
the difference in expenses between private and government schools is not large. While the fees
for private schools exceed that for public (indeed, most public schools are free) government
schools charge for uniforms, books and supplies. Operating costs of private schools are relatively
low, despite relatively higher teacher pupil ratios, due to lower salary structures. Overall, many
private schools can compete with government schools on total schooling costs. The survey
verified these costs by interviewing staff and managers. 

http://econ2.econ.iastate.edu/faculty/orazem/lahore.pdf 

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 21, 2016 at 9:16pm

In Lahore, Pakistan, parents with incomes of
less than 2,000 rupees per month spend 10–11
percent of their income on education, while
those with monthly incomes above 10,000
rupees spend 6 percent (Alderman et al.,
2001). 

http://www.epdc.org/sites/default/files/documents/The%20Effects%20o... 

Comment by Riaz Haq on April 12, 2017 at 10:16am

Nobel Peace Prize Recipiant Malala Yousafzai Is A Coward And A Hypocrite
http://www.returnofkings.com/45748/nobel-peace-prize-recipiant-mala...

The reason the Taliban shot Malala in the head was to send a message that they would attack girls who wanted to get a western-style education. So as soon as Malala had recovered, she immediately proved she was stronger than the Taliban by returning to her home in the Swat region of Pakistan. Except that last part didn’t happen.

When she awoke Malala eagerly embraced her celebrity status, travelling around the safe western world and making flagellant liberals and globalists feel good about themselves while peddling feminist dogma and her book. Malala bragged that she had bested the Taliban, and that she was not afraid of them. The world cheered her on, thumbing their nose alongside her at the oppressive Taliban from the safety of western countries.

Malala did not go back to live in Pakistan. She resides in England and was attending an English school when they came in and told her she won the Nobel Peace Prize. Malala was lucky that she was co-opted for an agenda and was given a great place to live in the western world, because while she is touring the globe, advocating girls rights to education, those same girls are the ones forced to continue to live in places where they can be hurt and killed for trying to attend school.

While Malala was laughing, playing and enjoying the safety of receiving an education in a predominantly white country found upon Christian morals, school girls in Africa were being kidnapped. While Malala mugged for the camera, giving speeches to the choir about how extremists are fools to think bullets can silence women’s rights in the 3rd and 2nd world in buildings protected by men with guns, Yazidi girls are being turned into sex slaves by those same men, most of whom will not face any prosecution or justice for their actions.

Let me repeat: after the Taliban shot her in the head, Malala opted to live in England. She ran away. They shot her in the head and she ran away. I don’t know in what crazy world people think that being chased out of your home counts is a victory but it certainly isn’t the real one. They shot Malala, and that scared her away. That was a decisive victory for the Taliban and for anti-female extremists everywhere.

And every time Malala gives a speech or drops another nonsensical, feel good quote for useful idiots to lap up, those extremists laugh. They’re laughing at Malala. And the girls Malala claims to represent, and whom she abandoned to their fate simply because she had the chance to, are the ones who are now suffering. Getting shot in the head is pretty extreme, and I could respect Malala if she took it and continued to live in Pakistan. But she ran. She gave up. The extremists won unequivocally, and no amount of desktop wall papers will change that irrefutable fact. 

Comment by Riaz Haq on April 12, 2017 at 10:16am

Malala is not ours to adopt

http://www.dailycal.org/2013/10/18/malala-ours-adopt/

Malala Yousafzai has been speaking out for girls’ rights to education in Swat Valley, Pakistan, and against the oppressive regime of the Taliban since the tender age of 10 — long before she became a darling of the Western media. But through the media’s recently renewed obsession and essential co-optation of her story and cause, Malala and her incredible achievements have been reduced to yet another portrayal of the West as the saviors of the East.

We can’t deny the horrific acts of the Taliban regime or the fact that it has committed a gross violation of human rights in denying Pakistani girls the right to education. It is imperative that we see the deeper historic and racist narrative at play here.

For instance, take Jon Stewart’s interview with Malala. I usually enjoy watching his show, but his offhand comment about wanting to “adopt” Malala is both naïve and offensive. By even joking about adopting Malala, Stewart has made light of the fact that women are seen as property in many parts of the world. Although he may not have intended to commodify Malala as something even capable of being adopted, his seemingly innocent words further propagate the idea of a superior Western ideology and further the image of women as unequal. I’m almost positive Stewart wasn’t trying to support the troublesome neocolonial Western ideology of taking what isn’t theirs to take. Such a naive comment, however, did exactly that.

This “adoption” of Malala by the Western media has had several unforeseen consequences. Her own people are rejecting her as a “tool of the West.” One Pakistani blogger recently wrote, “It doesn’t matter if she denies (it). She is, what she is; that is, (a) Western puppet … Yes, you are an American puppet.”

It’s heartbreaking to see someone make as many personal sacrifices as Malala has only to be rejected by her peers and her motherland, not because of the Taliban’s target on her but because her own people’s offense at the Western media’s obsession with her and Malala’s seeming acceptance of such. Pakistani people have no reason to trust any Western actions toward them — no matter how benevolent they may seem. What with America’s use of international doctors as a means of getting to Osama Bin Laden without any communication with the Pakistani government or intelligence, why would the Pakistani people trust the West after all we’ve done?

Swallowing Malala’s story is much easier than casting a critical eye on the role the West has had in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Syria, which has contributed to a significant portion of the suffering that the people in those respective nations are undergoing. U.S. policy supported the rise of the mujahedeen in Afghanistan, precursors to the Taliban, supporting radical jihadism and Islam as a retort against the Soviet Union and communist ideologies. Furthermore, U.S. military operations in Pakistan have ended thousands of innocent lives — actions that have gone largely unpunished and relatively unnoticed while the victims and their families have been sadly forgotten. It is not just the Taliban that is committing crimes against humanity. If the Western world wants to celebrate and take part in Malala’s advocacy for justice, it must first recognize all the different parties who have infringed on that justice, including its own policies — both historical and ongoing. Justice can’t be served selectively, for such justice really isn’t justice at all. 

Comment