Pakistan: Health, education emergency feared

Health, education emergency feared​

Country’s indicators fall below levels seen by world’s poorest nations

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Shahbaz RanaMay 03, 2023

The World Bank said that low human capital development could limit the realisation of Pakistan’s ambition to become an upper middle-income country by 2047. photo: AFP



ISLAMABAD:
A World Bank-led Pakistan human capital review has recommended the declaration of health and education emergency, as the country’s indicators fall below levels seen by the world’s poorest nations with eight out of 10 children unable to comprehend a simple text.


To boost its human capital, Pakistan needs to invest more in the supply of health and education through domestic resource mobilisation, shifting resources from costly energy subsidies and improving efficiency in the existing allocations to human development sectors, recommends the Pakistan Human Capital Review report released on Tuesday.

According to the report, an estimated 20.3 million of Pakistan’s school-age children are out of school.

In addition, Pakistan’s learning poverty rate – the percentage of children unable to read and understand a short age-appropriate text by the age of 10 – stood at 79% post-Covid-19 pandemic and the 2022 floods. This alarming ratio is 19 percentage points above the average for lower middle-income countries.


The World Bank said that the total cost of providing all current children in Pakistan with a quality education would conservatively cost 4.8% of GDP, or Rs4 trillion. This assumes that all children can be enrolled in public schools or low-fee private schools, at an average annual cost of $240 for each child.

With an estimated 20.3 million children out of school (aged 5-16), Pakistan has one of the largest number of children in the world not attending school.

The 20.3 million figure corresponds to nearly a third of Pakistan’s children aged 5-16, 82% of whom have never gone to school.

Due to population increases, this absolute number remains large, even as the share of out-of-school children has fallen in the past few decades, it added.

The Covid-19 pandemic has likely erased nearly a decade of progress on human capital for both boys and girls, according to the report.

The combined effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and the devastating floods, called as two shocks, have likely worsened the already high learning poverty and malnutrition and limited the cognitive, socio-emotional, and healthy development of Pakistan’s next generation, stated the bank.

They recommended “declaring emergencies over its health and education crises”, saying the country needs long-term planning beyond the tenure of any government and political cycle.

It also recommended making family planning a priority across all human development initiatives. Pakistan should integrate population planning into academic, religious, and national policies and develop its labour market to accommodate the growing youth population.

The World Bank said that low human capital development could limit the realisation of its ambition to become an upper middle-income country by 2047. Pakistan needs a healthy, skilled, and resilient population to ensure high economic growth that is both sustainable and inclusive.

The Human Capital Review has assessed the challenges and opportunities to improve Pakistan’s human capital outcomes.

Human capital makes up 61% of Pakistan’s wealth, yet its levels of human capital are among the world’s lowest. About 7% of newborns in Pakistan do not live to their fifth birthday. Around 40% of children under five are stunted, relegating them to a lifetime of physical and cognitive deficits.

Pakistan underperforms the South Asia region and even the average for Sub-Saharan Africa, according to the report.

On stunting and the quality of education, it performs below the average for Sub-Saharan Africa. Child survival rates until age five are far below the South Asia regional average and the same as the average for Sub-Saharan Africa.

The World Bank said that while children in Pakistan stay in school slightly longer than their peers in Sub-Saharan Africa, a 2019 regional assessment ranked Pakistan second from the bottom globally in science and mathematics performance by its 4th graders. Against peer and regional comparators, the only indicator on which Pakistan outperforms is the adult survival rate.

While the country has reached middle-income status and made significant progress in reducing poverty over the past two decades, low human capital outcomes limit Pakistan’s further progress, capping its growth and development prospects.

“Strong human capital is essential for sustainable economic growth, to prepare the workforce for the more highly skilled jobs of the future, and to compete effectively in the global economy,” said Mamta Murthi, World Bank’s Vice President for Human Development.

Mamta Murthi said that investing in human capital can also build resilience and adaptive capacity to withstand the effects of climate change, while developing the skills and ingenuity needed for a green and inclusive economy and to reduce inequality.

Pakistan’s Human Capital Index (HCI) of 0.41 means that a baby born in Pakistan today will only be 41% as productive as they could be if they enjoyed complete education and full health. The country’s HCI is lower than the South Asian average of 0.48, Bangladesh’s 0.46 and Nepal’s 0.49.

“Pakistan’s human capital outcomes are more comparable to Sub-Saharan Africa’s, which has an average HCI of 0.40”, according to the World Bank. Another facet of Pakistan’s human capital crisis is its low utilisation due largely to low female labor force participation.

The World Bank said that if Pakistan continues on its current trajectory in human capital development, its GDP per capita would grow overall by a mere 18% through 2047, the 100th anniversary of its founding.

If Pakistan can boost human capital investments and its HCI value to the level of its peers, per capita GDP could grow by 32%.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 3rd, 2023.
@hatehs @Kingdom come @Skull and Bones @Areesh

Health, education emergency feared | The Express Tribune

Country’s indicators fall below levels seen by world’s poorest nations

tribune.com.pk

 

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Investing in human capital of tomorrow​

From the Newspaper Published June 5, 2023 Updated about 14 hours ago

Batool is the daughter of a maid. There was fierce opposition at home when her mother enrolled her in school. Batool’s father claimed that the four-year-old would pick up bad habits and consort with boys if she was allowed access to education. The little girl’s older brothers refused to walk with her on the way to school because they, along with their father, strongly disapproved of educated women.

One in four girls in Pakistan have never been to school in 2018, according to World Bank statistics. According to Ahsan M Saleem, one of the founders of The Citizen Foundation, the girl child was the biggest casualty of the pandemic in terms of education.

“A girl child’s impact on society is about 100 times that of a male child because it is multi-generational. Even if the girl is a dropout, even if she is pulled out of school and forced to marry, she will ensure her children will study. It is practically a guarantee that an educated mother will educate her children. With a boy, there is a good chance, but not a guarantee,” he said in an earlier interview.

But not only the girls suffer from a lack of education. Three out of four (75pc) 10-year-olds in Pakistan cannot read a simple text, estimates World Bank. And this rate may have increased to 79pc owing to the pandemic and 2022 floods. At the current pace of progress in increasing education rates, it will take at least 50 years to enrol all girls and 31 years to enrol boys.

At $3.186 trillion, India’s GDP is roughly nine times bigger than Pakistan’s. Its allocation towards education is almost twice that of Pakistan. In 2021-22, the Economic Survey of Pakistan pointed out that only 1.77pc of GDP was spent on education. On the other hand, India has been working towards increasing female literacy rates. In 2006, 10pc of girls aged 11-14 did not attend school in 2006. By 2018, that number had dropped to 4.1pc, according to the Borgen Project.

Unicef estimates that Pakistan has the world’s second-highest number of out-of-school children. This leads to the unending cycle of poverty and illiteracy spiralling downwards, exacerbated by economic conditions. When people die over bags of flour, the education of children pales in comparison to the struggle to stay alive in the face of hunger and despair.

Gearing up for the inevitable elections, the government has announced 2.66tr for upliftment. Supporting industries and agriculture, making highways and repairing waterways are all efforts very much in the public eye and essential for growth. But how productive can the masses be if illiteracy continues to reign?

World Bank estimates that another year of schooling raises earnings by 10pc. A person unable to read or write will be stuck doing purely menial jobs. As the global economy’s pace of digitisation increases, countries that do not invest in education will lag at a faster rate. The government would do well to remember that.

Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, June 5th, 2023

Investing in human capital of tomorrow

When people die over bags of flour, children's education pales in comparison to the struggle to stay alive in the face of hunger and despair.

www.dawn.com

 

[CallSignMaverick]

At $3.186 trillion, India’s GDP is roughly nine times bigger than Pakistan’s.

No, India's GDP is 11 times more than pakistan despite pakistan's rebasing and which increased its GDP by 17% while India is yet to rebase its economy.

 

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Pakistan ‘borrows’ growth from its future

Pakistan’s external debt repayment problem is attracting more attention than the base problem of rapidly increasing...

www.brecorder.com

 

[Kuru]

eight out of 10 children unable to comprehend a simple text

I really hope Pakistan take immediate steps on this area. I don’t want more comprehension issues for Pakistanis on PDF after 15 years.

 

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Hunger in Pakistan​

Farhat Ali Published July 29, 2023 Updated about 4 hours ago

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Pakistan hosts the poorest population with per capita income at $1550 compared with Bangladesh at $2660 and India at $2210 by the end of 2023.

While Bangladesh and India are winning at per capita income and lifting more and more people out of poverty, Pakistan is at the losing end as more and more people falling below the poverty line every year. Global entities mapping hunger around the world present a similar outlook.

Pakistan, the world’s fifth most populous country, has been ranked 99th out of 129 nations in a Global Hunger Index (GHI) report which has described its level of hunger as “serious”. The fourth edition of the report, prepared in collaboration between German non-profit Welthungerhilfe and its Irish counterpart Concern Worldwide, is a peer-reviewed publication launched in Islamabad this week.

Alarmingly, according to the report, GHI projections show that at least 46 countries in the world, including Pakistan, will fail to achieve “low hunger” by 2030.

Pakistan achieved a score of 26.1 for the 2022 report, worse than its 29.6 in the last edition of the report in 2014. The 2007 and 2000 reports showed Pakistan’s GHI score at 32.1 and 36.8, respectively.

The launch of the GHI report follows a United Nations report issued in May 2023, which designated Pakistan as a “very high concern” area facing food insecurity.

The UN report, jointly prepared by the World Food Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organization, also painted a dire outlook for Pakistan, saying more than eight million people are expected to experience “high levels of acute food insecurity”.

The report points towards a tumultuous 18 months, in which a continuing political crisis has compounded the worst financial crisis the country has ever faced. Much went wrong in this period - the devastating floods which inflicted lasting damage on the economy (over USD 30 billion losses), a mounting balance-of-payment crisis which led to a huge fall in foreign reserves and increase in debt.

The country owes to its creditors more than $77 billion, payable in the next three years, according to the International Monetary Fund. Inflation has surged to a record high, touching 38 percent earlier this year, while energy tariffs have increased markedly, affecting industry and exports while the currency has plummeted by more than 50 percent against the US dollar in the past year.

The World Bank is of the view that poverty in Pakistan will inevitably increase with pressures from weak labour markets and high inflation, warning that delays in external financing, policy slippages, and political uncertainty pose significant risks to the macro poverty outlook.

In the absence of higher social spending, the lower middle-income poverty rate is expected to increase to 37.2 per cent in 2022-23, according to the World Bank report on the macro poverty outlook for Pakistan.

Given poor households’ dependency on agriculture, and small-scale manufacturing and construction activity, they remain vulnerable to economic and political shocks.

Official remittance inflows also fell by 11.1 percent, partly due to the exchange rate cap that made informal non-banking channels preferable. Any decline in overall remittances would reduce households’ capacity to cope with economic shocks, adding pressure on poverty, warns the report.

“South Asia, the region with the world’s highest hunger level, has the highest child stunting rate and by far the highest child wasting rate of any world region,” it added. Tragically, Pakistan was singled out along with five other countries with increasing stunting rates in children.

“The areas with the least improvement over time – where stunting levels either increased or stagnated were in central Chad, central Pakistan, central Afghanistan, and northeastern Angola, as well as throughout the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Madagascar,” the report said.

The worst suffering segment of society enduring the prevailing economic and political instability are the increasing poors of the nation - a reality little recognized and acted upon by the legislators who are voted to parliament to represent their interests.

The poor segments of the nation are little concerned with the liberal number of legislations related to political, legal and accountability framework and economic intricacies and all that help secure or protect the interests of the few. Hunger is the real or most important issue for the poor. A large number of them do not get even two meals a day.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2023

Hunger in Pakistan

Pakistan hosts the poorest population with per capita income at $1550 compared with Bangladesh at $2660 and India at...

www.brecorder.com

 

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No fear hafiz whiskey will resolve all issues

 

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Pakistan’s literacy rate on a downward spiral​

Kashif Abbasi Published September 9, 2023 Updated about 7 hours ago
ISLAMABAD: At a time when the world is celebrating literacy day, Pakistan does not have much to boast about in the wake of unsatisfactory literacy figures.


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According to Education Secretary Waseem Ajmal Chaudhry, the actual literary figure stood at 59.3pc compared to 62.8pc reflected in the Economic Survey 2022-23.

Talking to Dawn, Mr Chaudhry said the rate mentioned in the Economic Survey was based on a projected figure in the absence of the latest census. However, he said following the latest national census, the actual literary rate was calculated at 59.3pc.

He went on to say that this figure was higher than the previous actual figure, therefore “one can’t say that the country’s literacy rate had declined”.

Secretary claims situation has improved in comparison to previous figures

In fact it had seen some improvement, he added.

The federal secretary said the literary rate in all the provinces had gone up, with Punjab witnessing an increase from 66.1pc to 66.3pc; Sindh, 61.1pc to 61.8pc; Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 52.4pc to 55.1pc while Balochistan saw an increase from 53.9pc to 54.5pc.

“So now our actual literary rate is 59.13 pc,” he added.

Official sources said besides giving it the least priority, education sector also received the lowest funding, which was one of the main reasons for a decline in literacy rate.

According to a teacher at a federal government school, “60pc is not a satisfactory figure as 40pc of our population still remains illiterate”.

It is relevant to note here that Pakistan is spending less than 2pc of its GDP on education.

The Economic Survey 2022-23 had pointed out that the cumulative education expenditure made by the federal and provincial governments in fiscal year 2022 was estimated at 1.7pc of the GDP.

“Expenditures on education-related activities during FY2022 witnessed an increase of 37.3pc, which reached Rs1,101.7 billion from Rs802.2 billion,” it had stated.

The survey had also said that there were 32pc out-of-school children, with more girls than boys deprived of education.

It said that in Balochistan, 47pc children were out of school, followed by Sindh which had 44pc, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 32pc and Punjab had 24pc out-of-school children.

Pakistan had the highest number of out-of-school children in the world, with over 23 million children not attending schools.

Besides, quality of education also remains one of the main concerns of students.

Various survey reports on quality of education have painted a gloomy picture, stating that a substantial number of fifth graders were neither able to read a sentence in English nor Urdu.

Similarly, quality of higher education in the country has also fallen below the mark. During the last couple of years, a numbers of PhD holders have staged protests in Islamabad, seeking jobs in government universities.

“There is a need to reset our priorities; we will have to pay special focus on our health and education sectors. There is a need to provide adequate funding and patronage to the education sector in the greater interest of the country,” said an official of the education ministry.

Published in Dawn, September 9th, 2023

Pakistan’s literacy rate on a downward spiral

The actual literary figure stood at 59.3pc compared to 62.8pc reflected in the Economic Survey 2022-23, says official.

www.dawn.com