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Home » Culture » Family & Kids

Sunday, March 8, 2009

Pakistani girls seek better education

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  • Women listen intently during class at a reading center in Karachi, Pakistan. Many schools offer classes to illiterate women. The National Commission for Human Development has started 108,000 adult literacy centers in Pakistan since 2002 and taught 2.6 million women to read. (Mary F. Calvert/The Washington Times)
  • Somia Yaqoob, 4, hopes to go to school next year, but the prospects are not good in her village outside of Lahore. (Mary F. Calvert/The Washington Times)
  • Many businesses use symbols to advertise their wares because there are so many illiterate people in Pakistan. A woman looks for help in the dentistry district of Peshawar. (Mary F. Calvert/The Washington Times)
  • Families pay 20 to 30 rupees per girl per month to attend the Higher Secondary School in the Kashmiri town of Gundi Piran in the Patika District. They need textbooks for six to 10 subjects at a cost of 500 to 600 rupees per month. The younger students hold class in the open air, often relying on a campfire for warmth. (Mary F. Calvert/The Washington Times)
  • Nabeela Abid, 17, learned to read at the Dhalloki Adult Literacy Center. After classes, she goes home and teaches her father, Abid Hussain, 42, how to read. (Mary F. Calvert/The Washington Times)
  • Qudsia Talat, a teacher and trainer, greets neighborhood women in a poor area of Karachi. She hopes the women will be future students. (Mary F. Calvert/The Washington Times)
  • High school girls read from their books. Educational groups have seen the shortcomings of public schools, and many have taken steps to address them. (Mary F. Calvert/The Washington Times)
  • In Dhalloki, a small village outside Lahore, Sharifan Arif, 30, walks to her class at the Dhalloki Adult Literacy Center. She has five children who go to school. (Mary F. Calvert/The Washington Times)
  • In a village outside Lahore, Bushra Nazir, 35, shows her joy after writing her own name. She has been reading and writing for a few months. (Mary F. Calvert/The Washington Times)
  • Insa Azad, 30, holds her baby, Saif, in her arms while her son Samar, 4, looks over the counter. She sells candy to a young customer at her shop. Insa learned to read and do simple figures a few months ago at an adult literacy center and gained the skills she needed to open a little store next to her home in Islamabad. (Mary F. Calvert/The Washington Times)
  • A girl writes in her notebook at a girls school in Islamabad. A grown woman without an education is like a young woman without a dowry: socially handicapped, with limited options. (Mary F. Calvert/The Washington Times)
  • A young girl waits in a busy market in Peshawar while her mother shops. A proverb says that if you teach a man to read, you teach an individual. If you teach a woman to read, you teach the whole community. (Mary F. Calvert/The Washington Times)

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By Betsy Pisik

KARACHI, Pakistan | Yasmeen Khan, a mother of three, leaned down over her lesson book with steely concentration.

"I could sit outside, or I can be here and learn to read," she said after attending one of her children's classes. "Of course I will try to learn." Mrs. Khan was not alone. Several other mothers sat in the back of their daughters' classroom, eager to master rudimental literacy.

In the slums far from the manicured lawns of Islamabad, the cultural tumult of Lahore and the bustling commercial center just a half-hour's drive from this cramped neighborhood called Gulistan Colony, life can be unimaginably hard for a woman who cannot read.

She must memorize the dosages of her children's medicine because the labels mean nothing to her. She must be careful from whom she borrows because a $40 loan from the wrong man could cost her a daughter, and she must be very lucky in marriage or she might end up laboring in backbreaking or degrading work.

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Literacy legacy

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Pakistan, a country of intense slums, crushing poverty and sometimes oppressive faith, is handicapped by an educational system that even former government ministers don't energetically defend. The state does not have the money to improve schools in poor and crowded areas, nor can it invest in basic technology. Teachers might be only marginally better educated than their students. In Pakistan, culture is also complicit in keeping girls undereducated. Free religious schools, called madrassas, are based on the Koran and often emphasize memorization over reading, writing and arithmetic. Even relatively secular families may opt to send their children to madrassas, where all expenses are covered. In a country where one child in eight is informally employed in brute labor, carpet weaving, domestic service and the like, schooling will necessarily suffer. The eldest girl is frequently required to stay at home to care for the elderly or younger siblings.

A grown woman without an education is like a young woman without a dowry: socially handicapped, with limited options. This is especially true in countries such as Pakistan, where poverty and corruption have severely limited government services.

"Educating girls is such a luxury," said Mehnaz Aziz, director of the Children's Global Network, a consultancy that works with the United Nations and also receives U.S. funding. "Quality education is a privilege here, not a right. If something has to go, it's the girls' education that will go."

Roughly half of Pakistan's 173 million citizens know how to read, according to the CIA World Factbook. Sixty-three percent of the men are literate, compared with only 36 percent of the women.

The gap between male and female literacy ranks Pakistan 127th out of 130 countries surveyed last year by the Switzerland-based World Economic Forum.

The situation here looked more promising a year ago, Ms. Aziz said. That was before a spike in terrorist bombings hurt Pakistan's foreign reputation and internal stability and before the global economic downturn forced the government to turn to the International Monetary Fund for an emergency loan to pay interest on its foreign debts.

Despite pockets of progress, "if you look from a bird's eye view, people are not bothered with girls' education," Ms. Aziz said sadly. "They are more worried about how to feed their family."

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