Islamabad:The employees of National Education Foundation (NEF) and National Commission for Human Development (NCHD), along with a large number of teachers, braving extremely hot weather, on the third day of the sit-in on Wednesday told media men that the winding up institution like NCHD would be a big blow to the cause of education as Pakistan is already lagging behind in achieving ‘Education For All’ and literacy targets.

They said it is the responsibility of the government to protect NCHD that has the infrastructure and skilled human resource to improve human development indicators in Pakistan.

They said that NCHD supported the government in enrolling 11.56 million out-of-school children age 5-7 years; established 13,068 community feeder schools to provide access and cater for increased enrolment, and provided 4,719 feeder teachers in government schools, imparting training to 146,225 government teachers on quality education.

They said that the Commission also established 145,411 adult literacy centres, where 3.2 million learners were imparted functional literacy; 95% of who were females. They said that NCHD also trained 13 million women in primary healthcare and screened over 2 million children in the primary schools for eyesight and hearing.

They said that NCHD was a public private partnership model and a number of Pakistani expatriates multinationals are on board. NCHD has raised 30 million dollar from the private sector. During the floods the members of board of NCHD raised over a Rs100 million. They recently contributed Rs25 million to the literacy programme of NCHD.

They said that as per the decision, more than 16,000 people would become jobless and over 5,000 children would be deprived of education studying in the primary schools being run by NCHD that is a complete negation of Article 25-A of constitution under which the state is responsible to provide free education to all children at the age of five to sixteen year.
NCHD was established in 2002 in response to the recommendations of the Task Force with the mandate to promote Human Development by supporting government line departments, non-governmental organisations and elected officials at the district level in primary education, literacy, income generating activities and provision of basic healthcare services The news.