Voice Of Children

The writer is an undergraduate student at Harvard University, Class of 2014. He is also the Chairman of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum. He tweets @ibrahimakhan

Ten per cent of the world’s children who do not go to primary school live in Pakistan. Twenty-six countries are poorer than Pakistan but send more of their children to school. A meager 1.5  per cent of Pakistan’s GDP is spent on schooling which is less than the subsidies given to PIA, Pepco and Pakistan Steel. The average teacher is absent once a week. Our constitution gives every child the right to an education until the age of sixteen, and yet, 25 million Pakistani children do not have this right. These facts are courtesy of the Education Emergency Pakistan movement and they illustrate the dire situation our education system is facing.
Currently, education in Pakistan is rooted in rote learning and absent-minded memorisation. Creativity and problem-solving are disregarded. Knowledge is thrust at students, who have devised ways to retain the knowledge temporarily, regurgitate it and move on. But this is not the essence of education. An acceptable modern education is one that gives a student the best preparation for life after school. In our working lives, we have to make decisions and solve problems that require creative solutions. And yet Pakistani students do not learn these essential skills in school.
To make things worse, in most secondary and post-secondary examinations, a large part of the material is left to choice. In order to pass an examination, 33 per cent of the attempted material needs to be correct. This means that a student will pass an examination by knowing less than 33 per cent of a given subject’s material. Nowhere else in the world is the education standard this low.
The massive inequality present in our education system needs to be eradicated through various forms of regulation. We must devise a Pakistani system of education that is recognised internationally since our current system has lost international credibility. Then there is the difference between the Urdu-medium and English-medium systems. Hence, there is an urgent need for a coherent education policy that is able to form a unified framework for all Pakistani students.
As Heather Wolpert-Gawron an award-winning school teacher in the US, suggests in a recent book, an education system should value certain skills. Collaboration and communication should be encouraged. Problem-solving should be practiced, decision-making learned and questioning valued. Students should be comfortable with synthesising information and listening to others. Most importantly, they should develop leadership skills which are of particular importance to Pakistan. At the tertiary level, the idea of a liberal arts education is gaining traction worldwide. Its core philosophy is promoting choice and creativity, something we need to adopt.
Apprenticeship is prevalent in Pakistan and thus cannot be ignored when discussing education reform. Many poor children, who cannot afford an education, drop out of school in order to learn specific skills. Often these workers are misused and denied basic labour rights. These children need to remain in schools where their apprentice work is institutionalised and they are given a basic level of education. This will ensure an educated technical workforce, which is essential for any developing nation.
We need to act and act soon. Education reform must be emphasised, as it is today’s youth that will determine the state of tomorrow’s Pakistan.
Published in The Express Tribune, January 19^th, 2012.

ISLAMABAD - The United Arab Emirates (UAE) Ambassador Essa Abdullah Al-Basha Al-Nuaimi hosted a reception at the Jinnah Convention Centre to mark the first anniversary celebrations of the United Arab Emirates- Pakistan Assistance Programme.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Governor Barrister Masood Kausar was the guest of honour at the occasion. Kausar spoke highly of the Pakistan-UAE bilateral relations, saying that he hoped that the brotherly, time-tested ties would continue to gain strength in the future as well.
The KPK governor, the UAE Ambassador and other diplomats cut a special cake. The national anthems of the two countries were also played on the occasion.
Paying tribute to the armed forces for their role in the rehabilitation of Swat and thanking the UAE government for its generous assistance, Kausar hoped that both the countries would improve trade, diplomatic, and cultural ties.
Ambassador Nuaimi assured Pakistan of UAE’s continued assistance to help out the people of the calamity-affected areas.
The ambassador said his country had a rich history of bilateral cooperation with Pakistan and his country’s leadership, especially President Shaikh Khalifa bin Zyed Al Nahyan and Prime Minister Muhammad bin Rashid Al Maktoum, were very keen to enhance it further.
Saudi Arabian Ambassador Abdul Aziz bin Ibrahim Saleh Al-Ghadeer, leaders of various political parties, members of the parliament, intellectuals, senior civil and military officials, diplomats, PTCL chairman Waleed Reshad, dignitaries from Swat and journalists attended the function.
Abdullah Al Daffali of the UAE programme and Maj Gen Zahir Shah, commander of the area, signed projects for the development of the areas in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa which were targeted by extremists and needed repair and rehabilitation.
Children in traditional costumes sung a number of songs, appreciating the contribution made by the UAE government and its rulers for the betterment of their areas.

A year ago today, India saw its last recorded case of polio in an 18-month-old girl in West Bengal named Rukhsar Khatoon. She recovered without lasting paralysis.
One year without another case is an impressive milestone in the decades-long effort to wipe the poliovirus from the face of the planet. Only a few years ago, India reported more polio cases than anywhere else — as many as 100,000 cases a year.
"India is a major, major victory," Dr. Hamid Jafari, who leads the World Health Organization's polio eradication efforts in India, told Shots. "It has established the feasibility beyond doubt of eradication. (If) it can be done under such tough conditions in India, this can be done anywhere else."
  India's victory, if it's validated by careful vetting over next few months, comes at a time when the possibility of global eradication has never never looked so close. When all the numbers for 2011 are in, WHO expects to count about 700 cases of polio — about half the total in 2010.
If polio is eradicated, it would become only the second human infectious scourge to be conquered — after smallpox, in 1979. As in the case of smallpox, polio eradication is feasible because the virus only infects humans and there are effective vaccines against it.
A polio-free India means that there are just three nations where polio is considered endemic: Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria.
The poliovirus has popped up in other places recently — notably China, where cases were imported from Pakistan, and Chad, from Nigeria. But India's long-standing role as the world's biggest exporter of polio to other countries has apparently ended.
The lessons from India will be sifted for years to come. But it's clear that conquering polio in that nation of 1.2 billion people is as much a story of massive persuasion as it is one of medical science.
India started its war on polio 17 years ago, and gradually the virus was eliminated in much of the country. But not from a wide swath in the north, in predominantly Muslim communities, such as Moradabad, a city of 4 million about 100 miles from the capital of New Delhi.
"Moradabad really was the litmus test for India. If it could get rid of polio there, it could get rid of it anywhere," says Michael Galway of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Galway, who worked with UNICEF on polio eradication in India, says many cases of polio throughout India were traced back to Moradabad and surrounding areas in the states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
"Genetically we tracked every single virus in the country," Galways says. "We could tell you exactly where that virus came from. And in the end, all roads led back to Uttar Pradesh and Bihar."
And that's where the tactics of persuasion were crucial. These districts have big Muslim populations, and many Muslims believed rumors that polio vaccination was a plot against their community. It's a conviction that has hampered polio vaccination campaigns elsewhere – most notably in northern Nigeria.
"There were two kinds of misconceptions," says Hakeem Syed Masoom Ali Azad, an influential imam, or Muslim leader, in Moradabad. "No. 1, people said the medicine contains ingredients derived from pork, which is prohibited in Islam. Second, they said the medicine would make our children infertile."
But this week, Varisha Gul had no qualms when she took her 18-month-old daughter Mozamma to a child health clinic in Moradabad to be vaccinated.
"No, no, we give (the vaccine) to our children," she told Elliott Hannon, an NPR stringer based in New Delhi. She says she knows of no parents in Moradabad who refuse to have their children vaccinated against polio.
That's a testament to the massive educational campaign conducted over years by the polio strategists – beginning with respected scholars in Muslim universities and reaching all the way down to trusted shopkeepers.
So-called influencers were identified alley by alley in the neighborhoods of Moradabad and elsewhere. Eventually, imams began to preach sermons endorsing polio vaccination, issued fatwahs of approval, and announced vaccination clinics from their mosques.
"We went and changed their minds," the Moradabad imam says. "We took the (vaccine) ourselves in front of them and gave it to our children in front of them. People slowly began to come around, thank God! Because of our effort, our district hasn't had any new polio cases."
But Jafari of the WHO says India's work is far from finished.
"High levels of immunity in India will have to be maintained until there is global eradication achieved," he says. Otherwise imported cases could cause the whole effort to unravel.
So this Sunday, 100,000 vaccinators will fan out across high-risk districts such as Moradabad to vaccinate 40 million children. Other, nationwide, vaccination days will occur later in the year.
Every newborn Indian child needs to be vaccinated in case the virus reappears. Every child crossing the border from Pakistan will be vaccinated to detect importation of the virus. Sewage across India will be carefully monitored to detect even a single wild poliovirus.
Jafari's main worry is complacency. But his team allowed itself a quiet celebration.
"We will perhaps maybe have some cake and pass that around because people have worked extremely hard over the years," he said.

KARACHI: Make-A-Wish Foundation Pakistan, a non-governmental organisation (NGO), working to fulfill the cherished wishes of terminally ill children, has managed to meet the innocent wishes of three ailing children, who wished to have a meeting with Bollywood ‘Dabang’ star Salman Khan. The wish children Hubaiba Rizwan, Muhammad Shehroz, Muhammad Anas, all suffering from life threatening illnesses expressed Make-A-Wish Pakistan about their cherished wish of meeting their favourite Dabang’s Chulbul Pandey and Bodyguard’s Lovely Singh, Salman Khan. The meeting was arranged in collaboration with Make-A-Wish India, whose Khan is an active member, said a statement, issued here on Friday. According to the statement, a special ceremony was organised in Bombay for the wish granting where the children met Khan. These children were dressed in Khan’s get up of Dabang and Body Guard. Khan hugged these children and spent considerable time with them and invited them to watch the shooting of his movie. The children presented him a letter signed by other ailing children saying, ‘‘Because of our illness we cannot travel to meet him, why don’t you come to Pakistan to meet us?’’ Khan informed the Founding President of Make-A-Wish Pakistan Ishtiaq Baig that he had good memories of Pakistan where he spent a day with his brothers Sohail Khan and Arbaaz Khan at Hawks Bay and promised that he would soon visit Pakistan to meet other Make-A-Wish children. Baig presented Ajrak and Sindh topi to Khan and his brother Sohail. Both brothers lauded the work of Make-A-Wish Foundation and said that they were truly touched by meeting the ailing children from across the border. staff report