‘It won’t be possible to educate all our children if population continues to grow at same rate’

The number one issue in Pakistan that should be dealt on an emergency basis is not education but population growth.

This was said by Shahnaz Wazir Ali, the president of Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Institute of Science and Technology (Szabist) as she addressed on Saturday a session titled 'How can one improve the stagnated education system in Pakistan?' organised by the Pakistan Women's Foundation for Peace at the Pakistan American Culture Centre.

She emphasised that if the population growth continued at its current rate, it would be impossible to educate all the children if the country regardless of the efforts made by the state and its people.

Shahnaz highlighted that Pakistan's population had an annual growth rate of 2.4 per cent, but its economy struggled to exceed 2 per cent growth.

In the light of these facts, the Szabist president asked how we could provide education to all our children when our economic growth was lower than our population growth.

By drawing attention to the pressing issue of population growth, she shed light on the urgent need for effective solutions to ensure access to education for every child in the country.

She also stressed the importance of children’s health for their education. If a child was not fed breakfast, even the best curriculum, classroom, and teacher would not make a difference, she explained.

She mentioned that Pakistan had the highest rates of stunted growth and malnutrition in the world, second only to one African country.

The Szabist president called for working on family planning in the country. While best efforts on an individual basis were being taken in this regard, she said, the government needed to step in and make an effort to control the population growth.

She stressed the need for counselling married couples to encourage having fewer children and ensuring that the first child was not born within nine months of marriage. Additionally, she emphasised that girls should not be married off before the age of 16 or 17 and that the legal age of marriage for girls should be 21.

She noted that Sindh was currently the only province in Pakistan where the legal age of marriage for a girl was 18.

Agha Khan University Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science Prof Stephen M Lyon stressed the need for training teachers for quality education. He said that the teachers needed to be treated as professionals and they should be paid decently.

Giving an example of The Citizens Foundation, he said it specialised in teachers’ education and the children benefited from that.

Durbeen Chief Executive Officer and Zindagi Trust Board of Governors member Salma Ahmed Alam said addressing population growth was the need of the hour. Quality education, she said, could never be ensured without teachers’ education.

Pakistan Women's Foundation for Peace chairperson Nargis Rahman said that when the subject of their seminar was announced, criticism was directed at the phrase ‘stagnated education system’. “Thanks to our prime minister who declared an education emergency and has confirmed that it is valid,” she remarked.

Pakistan’s education system, she said, had languished in crisis for decades with 59 per cent literacy rate at present earning us low ranks in global indices for human development, literacy, education, and gender equality.

“We also failed in the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) and are not faring well in the Sustainable Development Goals,” she remarked.

She said that these failures cast aspersions on the political leadership of the country who for half a century had sidelined education, not realising how it impacted all development and was a crucial tool for the emerging nations to accelerate into becoming developed nations.

In the United Nations Development Program, she said, Pakistan ranked 157th out of 191 countries, reflecting low educational attainment levels and limited access to quality education, and was the lowest in the South Asian region, barring Afghanistan, as per the 2023 data.