"The ghost schools of Pakistan," by Sarah Stuteville for the GlobalPost
02 Jul 2009 22:16:13 GMT Source: Pulitzer center
Significant funding — much of it US money — goes toward
non-existent education provided by non-existent schools.By Sarah Stuteville for the GlobalPostKARACHI
— Despite ankle deep garbage, charcoal-scribbled graffiti of machineguns and the scorched remains of squatters’ fires, the dusty green
chalkboard still reads “December 2, 2006,” the last day that classes
were held in the primary school wing of Mirza
Adam Khan, a
government-run compound of schools in the poor and violence plagued
Karachi neighborhood of Lyari.This is just one of as many as an estimated 30,000 “ghost schools”
—
nonfunctioning schools that continue to exist only on paper —
throughout Pakistan. Recent government reports suggest almost 7,000
such schools exist throughout the southern Pakistani
province of Sindh,
many of them in the megacity of Karachi.“A ghost school might be a school which is not there, it never was
built, and they said ‘oh we’ve built the
school’ and there’s actually
no school there,” said professor Anita Ghulam Ali, former Sindh
education minister and head of Sindh Education Foundation, a government
agency that works
to address education issues in the province.“Then of course the usual, the most common one is where the school
is closed and there are no teachers, so for all intents and purposesit’s a ghost school.”Literacy rates and school attendance in Pakistan, while recently
improved, still hover around 50 percent. The Pakistani government has
promised a renewed
commitment to improving education in the country
including an increased budget and the launching of new programs.And the U.S. House of Representatives has passed a military and
civilian aid
package to Pakistan with earmarks for education which now
awaits approval in the Senate.But many here worry that money and promises alone won’t address the root problems. Continue reading on the Global Post. For all related reporting visit Pakistan: Hearts and Minds
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