KP govt urged to retain budget for girls education
PESHAWAR:01 januarey: The girls education activists on Thursday asked the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government to retain the 70pc of the budget for girls education in the province for the 3rd consecutive year.
They made the demand while speaking at a press conference which was organized by Blue Veins, a civil society organization working for promoting the girls education in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
The speakers, including Qamar Naseem, Sana Ahmad and Tehreem Aftab, stressed that the upcoming budget of KP and the utilization of the existing budget must prioritize efforts which enabled all girls to complete secondary education and develop the knowledge and skills they needed for life and work.
The nonprofit organization representatives quoted from the critical data on the state of education in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The figures showed that up to 1.8 million children in KP were out of school.
The statistics revealed that the children in the province were 23 per cent of the total population of those aged 5 to 17 years.
It said that out-of-school children, 64 per cent were girls and 36 per cent boys. Overall, 34 per cent of boys across the province had never gone to school or dropped out against 66 per cent for girls.
Out of the total number of primary schools in the province, 61 per cent were for boys and only 39 per cent for girls while out of the total 5,538 secondary schools in KP, 61 per cent were for boys and 39 per cent for girls.
Qamar Naseem of the Malala Fund Education Champion said: “In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, girls face barriers to education, caused by poverty, cultural norms, and practices, poor infrastructure, violence, and fragility.
“Girls education should be a strategic development priority for KP and other provinces of the country”, he suggested.
A young girls education activist, Sana Ahmad, who is a Program Officer, Blue Veins and Coordinator for the Child Rights Movement (KP) said that the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has amplified the already acute girls education crisis in Pakistan.
“Poverty, gender, and marginalization have joined hands to heighten inequalities, making it harder than ever for girls from poorer, rural households to learn. If leaders don’t act now, these girls may never return to schools,” she feared.
The education right champion praised the KP government for allocating 70 per cent of the education budget for the girls education for the last two years. She asked the provincial government to maintain such allocation for the third consecutive year as well.
Tehreem Aftab, Training Officer, said according to the World Bank data the return on one year of secondary education for a girl correlates with as high as a 25 per cent increase in wages later in life.The news.
