Today marks the annual International Day of Education, a day to remind countries around the world of their obligation to ensure the right to education enshrined in Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The declaration calls for free and compulsory elementary education, while the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) goes further and calls for countries to make higher education accessible to all. Sadly, most countries in the Global South are far from achieving universal elementary education, let alone the more ambitious goal set by the UNCRC. And while progress in digital education and artificial intelligence can, in theory, help make education more accessible for the underprivileged, they can also widen gaps due to disparities in access to digital technologies. There is also the impact of AI on human agency and knowledge in general to consider. This is reflected in this year’s theme for the International Day of Education: 'AI and education: Preserving human agency in a world of automation'. Simply put, the very relevance of educating and schooling children is now somewhat in question, given just how rapidly new technologies are doing the work and giving the answers people once did.
However, the impact of technology on education and related concerns might be a step too far for countries like Pakistan that are still struggling with actually getting their children to school in the first place. According to a report by the Pak Alliance for Maths and Science released last September, the number of out-of-school children in the country is estimated to be over 25 million. To put this number into perspective, the UN claims that there are around 250 million children and adolescents not in school, which would mean Pakistan alone accounts for around 10 per cent of the global total. Pakistan already had around 20 million out-of-school children before Covid-19 and the 2022 floods and the education statistics report appears to back the claims that these crises only compounded the shortcomings in the education sector. In the face of these damning statistics, the government still managed to come up with a paltry education budget last summer, with a mere 1.9 per cent of GDP currently being spent on education. This is less than half of the 4.0 per cent of GDP for education recommended by international experts.
Surprisingly, rather than being able to leverage increasing digitisation to expand access to education, Pakistan still has over a third of its children not in school and the total number of out-of-school children is only growing. And the costs of having so many children not in school are growing. With AI and other new technologies only expanding, the skills to navigate the digital world and familiarity with new technologies are only becoming more and more important for the next generation. The cost of missing out on this knowledge will be very steep. For a country struggling to keep its economy afloat and a youth bulge that puts a premium on jobs and growth, they are simply unaffordable.