Daily Times

Last month I happened to attend an event on the Sustainable Development Goals for 2030 in Bangkok, Thailand. Among the 17 goals and multiple targets with drawn indicators the main focus of the event was on the 4th goal: ensuring inclusive and equitable education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.

While the event proceeded I was reflecting on the situation of Pakistan where more than 24 million children are out of school; where there is wide disparity in access to education; and where there has been so far no consensus on the type or quality of education. While the event venue was flashing with colourful power point slides by various delegates, I was brooding on areas in rural Pakistan where the question — whether Islam allows education for girls — is still a hot debate.

A few days before to this write-up I got a call from a person in Diamer, a district of Gilgit-Baltistan in the Karakorum. He said, requesting anonymity, that in Diamer the clerics — majority of who belongs to the Deobandi sect — do not allow education for girls at all. He had approached a well-known Deobandi “moderate” cleric in Islamabad to come to Diamer and hold meetings with the mullahs (clergy) there on the issue. The person also requested me to help. I straightaway referred Alif Ailaan — the nationwide private campaign for education — to him. I did so because of two reasons.

In our country it is usually quite hard to convince any government, civilian or military, for support to education. Officials have their own priorities whereas political leaders do not deem education an effective means to garner votes mainly because the voters — parents, especially of the children at the public schools — do not have education included in their day-to-day discourse. The daily discourse in our society is controlled either by politics or religious sermons. Television channels and majority of the newspapers are the effective means to keep the people misinformed, whereas the street discourse revolves around religious rituals, edicts and conspiracy theories. This has hindered the progress of the common folk, particularly the poor and the marginalised in rural areas.

Secondly, my experience in trying to push education to the centre in this day-to-day discourse with the support of Alif Ailaan prompted me to recommend it for the caller from Diamer.

In the one-year long education campaign we designed with the support of the Alif Ailaan for the rural parts of upper Swat recently, I came to the conclusion that the best way to address the issues of access, retention and quality in education is to engage the parents. Although the lasting impacts of the “discourse” campaign have still to become visible, yet we saw some growing interest of parents in the education of their children, both male and female.

True, the perennial apathy in our traditional societies for women and girls is not that easy to break immediately, but things can be improved if we start to engage those who are part of the problem. The local village leaders and traditional institutions such as jirga (village council) or panchayat (traditionally organised groups of elders and influential people) need to be taken onboard in such endeavours.

It is imperative that we try to think out of box, particularly out of the western box, as they have different social set-ups, religious patterns and behaviour. In our context we cannot exactly copy what they have adopted. We simply cannot do away with the traditional and ultra-religious. We cannot operate in a society afflicted by a deep cultural malaise.

In the yearlong campaign we engaged the village elders first. After having them engaged thus we then broadened the strategy to union council level, and finally expanded the efforts to the entire area. In the meetings on education — we called them “Taleemi (educational) Jirga” — the elders were allowed to speak up their minds. They would engage in hard talks with each other. The end result used to come out an agreement on girls education with complaints about government for not providing enough schools for girls. Each Taleemi Jirga used to include the elders, religious leaders, local political leaders, elected representatives and members of the Tableeghi Jamaat (the apolitical religious preaching movement in Pakistan). None of them opposed the idea of education for girls.

Now as we are moving to the next phase of the campaign — which is lobbying with the government for constructing more schools in the target area — we have already noticed people discussing the need of education in their respective villages. Many of them have by now started to approach the concerned member of the provincial assembly, local government representatives, and civil society people for establishing schools for their daughters.

While it is necessary to launch data-based campaign on micro level, at the same it is even more critical to take the discourse to the street, shops and mosques. This could be done with more such sustained efforts under the auspices of organisations like the Alif Ailaan.

The writer is the Executive Director Idara Baraye Taleem-o-Taraqi