Daily Times

Chief Secretary Major (retd) Azam Suleman Khan has said that the improvement of education standards is the need of the hour as it is a great national task. “We should all endeavour to achieve this goal so that our children may avail appropriate opportunities by securing good education,” he said, while presiding a briefing session on the activities and achievements of the Sindh Education Foundation (SEF) at the Sindh Secretariat on Thursday.

Finance Secretary Shahab Ansari, SEF Managing Director Naheed Shah Durani, School Education Secretary Dr. Alya Shahid, Planning & Development Secretary Dr. Sheereen Mustafa and Sindh Rural Support Organisation chief executive officer were in attendance.

Azam Suleman asked the School Education Secretary and SEF managing direcor to ensure coordinated efforts for enhancing the standards of education and prepare a viable plan to submit to the government for approval for the purpose.

The chief secretary encouraged the officials in attendance to prepare plans in consultation with their teams so that at the implementation stage, ownership of projects could be ensured and delayed avoided.

Earlier, the SEF managing director briefed the meeting about the performance of the foundation. She said it was established in 1992, and initially supported home and community schools as well as fellowship programmes. Overtime, she said, the foundation also started supporting low cost private schools through a per-child/monthly subsidy model and it is now providing technical support to the partner schools through teacher training.

She informed the gathering that the the SEF had trained 14,000 teachers and 600 headmasters/headmistresses in 300 schools in the academic year 2014-15 alone. The enrolment of students was 266,000, which kept increasing till 2017-18 and reached 555,000. She also informed the meeting that the foudation was providing support to adopted schools as well.

The SRSO CEO also briefed the meeting about the assistance programme for school infrastructure services under the Union Committee-based Poverty Reduction Programme (UCPPRP). “It has taken over 102 closed government primary schools, and is now supporting community development in strategic fields of agriculture, livestock, entrepreneurship. It is providing furniture, fixture and uniforms to 8,000 students, almost 60 percent of whom are girls.”

Published in Daily Times, August 3^rd 2018.