By IPS Correspondents
KARACHI, May 5 1998 (IPS)

Believe it or not, but there is a race on for school admission for girls in the frontier province of Balochistan, Pakistan’s least developed and most conservative region.

The unprecedented rush is for the schools set up exclusively for girls under the Primary Education Development Project (PEDP), run jointly by the government with foreign donors and local non- government organisations (NGOs).

With schools packed to capacity – more than 8,000 girls are enrolled in the 200-odd PEDP schools — not all admission seekers are accommodated. Admits Minister for Education in Balochistan, Dr. Abul Malik, “there is now so much demand, particularly for girls, that we can’t fulfill it.”

The Pakistan government realised the full extent of public interest in girls’ education only after a survey in 1990, jointly done with the PEDP, revealed that some 28,000 girls were attending boys’ schools in Balochistan.

The discovery was startling, particularly since the province has reported in the past a low female literacy rate of 2 percent and the country’s highest drop out rate, 94 percent, for girls in primary schools.

“The (survey) finding was totally contrary to the perception that people don’t want to send their girls to school,” observes Dr. Quratul Ain Haider Bakhtiary, who heads PEDP.

It was all along assumed that the low female literacy rate in Pakistan was the fallout of the generally low status of women and girls in a traditional society, where “everyone wants a boy,” as Dr. Bakhtiary points out, and where girls give up their childhood to do household work and look after siblings.

The dearth of girls’ schools in villages made things more difficult. As a young teacher Uzma from Sibi village, in the interiors of Balochistan, pointed out, “(In the past) the community would say the government should provide funds, and the government would say the community is not interested in education.”

Now, the government and local communities understand each other better. “The idea of education for girls and others has taken root, and schools are cropping up. It seems there’s no stopping it,” observes Dr. Bakhtiary.

Even in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), on the border with Afghanistan, there is a visible change in attitude to education. Sixteen-year-old Nazma Khan of Haripur Town in the NWFP says she and her sister were put through school by their mother.

While both her parents are illiterate, Nazma said that though her father couldn’t see any reason why his daughters should study, “my mother put up quite a fight. She cooked and cleaned and worked as a labourer in other people’s fields to earn the extra money to send us to school. Because of this my sister and I have been able to study, and my sister has completed a homeopathic course in Haripur.”

“It’s really sad that parents don’t let their girls study,” she adds. “They think that if we learn to read and write we will just write love letters. That’s really stupid.”

The situation has changed much in the 1990s, the result of the shift in official “focus” in South Asia to the “girl child”, thinks Ghazala Rehman, Karachi-based women’s rights activist and educationist. “The girl child focus has had tremendous impact on Pakistan,” she said. “The concept has arrived – there has been a trickle-down effect to the remotest village.”

With dozens of NGOs joining in the campaign for education of girls, challenging the community’s resistance to change, old prejudices have been overcome.

A retired army officer working with a small Islamabad-based NGO relates how the girls’ school they started in Mianwali district, Punjab province, some years ago, initially faced much resistance from the villagers. A neighbouring village refused to send its girls to study there. “Now they come to us and want a girls’ school in their own area,” he confided.

The federal and provincial governments also have had to change policies, and redeploy funds. “Primary education was ignored in the past and got little funding,” admits Ejaz Malik, director of Primary Education in Balochistan.

Today, it is the focus of both government and NGO efforts. Among the many NGOs involved with adult education in Pakistan are the Agha Khan Rural Support Programme (AKRSP) in Gilgit in Pakistan’s mountainous north, and the All Mothers Educated Now (AMEN) project in Lahore, capital of the rich state of Punjab.

“I have seen many women completely transform themselves through education. They are unrecognisable after five years of schooling,” observes activist-educationist Rehman.

Balochistan’s PEDP is among the country’s biggest education projects. The strategy adopted was to set up schools with active community participation – many of them in far flung areas in the province – after meetings with village elders and male members to overcome traditional hostility and suspicion of outsiders.

“Education is a good thing. Schools are necessary for us,” acknowledged an old man interviewed by film-maker Mushtaq Gazdar last year for a documentary on the project.

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