Daily Times

Pakistan government’s endeavours to bring meaningful change in education, health, social service, art and culture cannot bear fruit until it has credible and verifiable data to help its policy makers design a long-term and sustainable policy.

The two-day ‘Thought Leaders Summit’ being organized by the British Council Pakistan on March 5-6 will highlight the need for collecting exact, reliable data and help the stakeholders discuss in detail issues relating to current research environment at our universities, mapping of art and artisans of Pakistan, women empowerment, enrollment of out of school children and many such issues.

Federal Minister for Planning, Development, Reforms and Special Initiatives Asad Umar will be chief guest on the first day of the summit and will share his vision of inclusivity and good governance, while Education Minister Shafqat Mehmood will be the chief guest on the concluding day.

Country Director BC Amir Ramzan will brief the stakeholders about the BC’s projects and share its reports with them. The event is expected to generate lively and useful debate among the stakeholders who will be coming from across the country to participate in the two-day discussions.

While briefing the media persons about the summit, British Council’s Director Research, Evaluation and Monitoring Unit Dr Maryam Rab and Policy and Research Analyst Izzah Meyer Thursday said a number of reports prepared by the BC’s REMU during last six years helped the parliamentarians and the decision makers in finalizing a policy draft and in some cases even legislation on key social issues.

The REMU on a regular basis keeps updating its stakeholders on latest practices and approaches in education and research sectors and provides latest data, said Dr Maryam Rab, adding the BC is also working closely with Higher Education Commission (HEC) so that education standards could be enhanced and research and evaluation standards could get a boost. She said it was of utmost importance if we did relevant and useful research in our relevant fields. She particularly mentioned Pak-UK Education Gateway which aims to enhance partnership between the higher education sectors of Pakistan and the UK. She further said the key areas of collaboration under this umbrella framework include innovative and collaborative research, higher education leadership, quality assurance and standard setting, distance learning, international mobility and transnational education.

While responding to a question on out-of-school children in Pakistan, Dr Maryam Rab said though she didn’t have the exact number of OOSC but she feared that a large number of 6-16 years old children were not enrolled in any formal school. British Council’s programme ‘Take A Child to School’ that is co-funded by Qatar’s ‘Educate A Child’ has been quite pivotal in access of children of remote areas of Pakistan to formal education, she said.