Assessing Public Sector Initiatives and Its Impact on the Development of Education Sector in Pakistan

Abstract

Education is an important tool for the socio-economic development of a nation. Government of Pakistan realizes the importance of education and has made serious efforts to address the issue of education at the macro-level. All education policies, plans and reforms were given some importance in order to remove gender disparity and to upgrade education status in Pakistan, which has resulted in an improved scenario. Therefore, the study enumerates the public sector initiatives (i.e. education plans, policies and schemes) which were taken by government of Pakistan during past 65 years. In order to evaluate the impact of government initiatives, different education indicators including literacy rates, gross & net enrolment trends and physical infrastructure in public schools, were analyzed. The results of the study show that besides all the aforementioned initiatives, the situation of education have not satisfactory improved. The government is still not able to achieve the required education standard (i.e. quality and quantity both). Even basic or primary education is not yet made accessible to all its population. It is analyzed that policy formulation is not enough criteria to develop a strong and effective education system. In fact successful education system depends on proper implementation of policy which further depends upon honest and hardworking staff, sufficient funding and political stability of the country. Unfortunately, Pakistan lacks in all these properties.