Riaz Haq writes this data-driven blog to provide information, express his opinions and make comments on many topics. Subjects include personal activities, education, South Asia, South Asian community, regional and international affairs and US politics to financial markets. For investors interested in South Asia, Riaz has another blog called South Asia Investor at http://www.southasiainvestor.com and a YouTube video channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkrIDyFbC9N9evXYb9cA_gQ
Divorce rate among foreign-born Pakistani-Americans with children is the third lowest of all immigrants in the United States, according to research recently published by the US-based Institute of Family Studies. Foreign-born Indian-Americans' marriages tend to be the most stable, followed by those of Bangladeshis and Pakistanis living in America. On the other end of the spectrum, the divorce rates among immigrants from Latin-America are the highest of all ethnic groups.
Immigrants from Taiwan, Korea, China, and Japan, also have greater family stability than native-born Americans, as do immigrants from the Middle East and South America, according to the IFS report. Here’s the list of top 20 immigrant groups in the US leading in marriage stability:
1. India - 94%
2. Bangladesh - 90%
3. Pakistan - 87%
4. Taiwan - 86%
5. Korea - 85%
6. China - 84%
7. Japan - 83%
8. Poland - 80%
9. Iran - 78%
10. Canada - 78%
11. Ukraine - 77%
12. Vietnam - 77%
13. Philippines - 76%
14. United Kingdom - 74%
15. Brazil - 73%
16. Germany - 72%
17. Venezuela - 72%
18. Nigeria - 71%
19. Russia - 68%
20. Mexico - 68%
There are 326,709 foreign-born Pakistani immigrants of working age (18-64) in the United States, according to figures cited by the Institute of Family Studies. Of these, 87% have been married only once and are still married while 10% are on their second marriage, 2.4% are divorced while 0.6% never married.
The Institute of Family Studies (IFS) is an advocacy group. The IFS mission is to "strengthen marriage and family life, and advance the well-being of children through research and public education".
Of every 1,000 babies born in Pakistan, 45.6 die before the end of their first month – 1 in 22, the highest infant mortality rate in the world, according to a United Nations Children's Fund report titled "Every Child Alive: The urgent need to end newborn deaths". Pakistan’s newborn mortality rate has declined by less than one quarter, from 60 in 2000 to 46 in 2016, according to UNICEF.
Of the 2.6 million newborn dying each year worldwide, India tops with 24% share followed by Pakistan with 10%. Ten countries, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Guinea-Bissau, India, Indonesia, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Pakistan and Tanzania account for more than half of the world’s newborn deaths, according to the report. Four of these 10 countries are in South Asia while the rest are in sub-Saharan Africa.
The percentage of mothers in Pakistan who gave birth
in a health facility increased from 21 per cent to 48 per cent between 2001 and
2013, and the proportion of women giving birth with a skilled attendant more
than doubled, from 23 per cent to 55 per cent over the same period. But
despite these remarkable increases, largely the result of rapid urbanization and
the proliferation of private sector providers not subject to satisfactory oversight,
Pakistan’s very high newborn mortality rate fell by less than one quarter, from
60 in 2000 to 46 in 2016, according to UNICEF.
The report says that more than 80 per cent of newborn deaths can be prevented "with access to well-trained midwives, along with proven solutions like clean water, disinfectants, breastfeeding within the first hour, skin-to-skin contact and good nutrition."
Community-Based Health Care:
How can Pakistan increase the number of childbirths in the presence of skilled attendants? The best option appears to be a skilled midwives program along the lines of the Lady Health Workers (LHW) program that is considered effective in delivering health education and care to women in remote villages.
“It (LHW) is one of the best community-based health systems in the world,” said Dr. Donald Thea, a Boston University researcher, talking about Pakistan's Lady Health Workers Program. Thea is one of the authors of a recent Lancet study on child pneumonia treatment in Pakistan. He talked with the New York Times about the study.
Published in British medical journal "The Lancet", the study followed 1,857 children who were treated at home with oral amoxicillin for five days and 1,354 children in a control group who were given standard care: one dose of oral cotrimoxazole and instructions to go to the nearest hospital or clinic. The home-treated group had only a 9 percent treatment-failure rate, while the control group children failed to improve 18 percent of the time.
Community Midwives:
In response to the low levels of skilled birth attendance in rural Pakistan, the government has introduced a new cadre of community midwives (CMWs).
In 2008, Pakistan extended community-based health system with the introduction of an 18-month training program for community midwives. Then, in 2014, United Nations Population Fund – together with the Department of Health and Sindh Province’s Maternal, Newborn and Child Health program – launched a pilot effort to supplement the midwifery courses with hands-on training. Midwifery coaches visited the midwives’ clinics, offering guidance and mentorship, according to UNFPA. So far, over 300 midwives have benefitted from the coaching and mentorship program.
The Sindh UNFPA model needs to be scaled up across the country with the help of the federal and provincial governments in Pakistan.
Summary:
Pakistan is the riskiest country for newborns. Of every 1,000 babies born in Pakistan, 45.6 die before the end of their first month – 1 in 22, the highest infant mortality rate in the world, according to a United Nations Children's Fund report titled "Every Child Alive: The urgent need to end newborn deaths". Pakistan’s newborn mortality rate has declined by less than one quarter, from 60 in 2000 to 46 in 2016, according to UNICEF. The country's progress in reducing infant mortality rates has been very slow. There is an urgent need to improve the situation by by scaling up community-based midwife programs nation-wide.
The story had the intended effect. Various commentators and pundits responded in a knee-jerk fashion. Without scrutinizing the data and checking the facts, they declared the situation "hopeless". Many Indian readers also jumped in on the discussions at various Internet sites to reinforce the doom and gloom about Pakistan.
Instead of joining the mourning crowd, I decided to check the original sources and found as follows:
1. The actual number of out of school children of primary age in Pakistan is 5.1 million.
2. The figures of 50% in Punjab, 61% in Sindh, 65% in KP and 78% in Balochistan are for pre-primary children ages 3 to 5 years, not for ages 6-16 years.
3. In 6-16 years age group, 7% of urban and 23% of rural children are out of school.
6. Data from Harvard researchers Rober Barro and Jhong-Wa Lee shows that Pakistan has been increasing enrollment of students in schools at a faster rate since 1990 than India. In 1990, there were 66.2% of Pakistanis vs 51.6% of Indians who had no schooling. In 2000, there were 60.2% Pakistanis vs 43% Indians with no schooling. In 2010, Pakistan reduced it to 38% vs India's 32.7%.
UNESCO data also shows that a significant percentage of out-of-school children in Pakistan are expected to enter school:
I do not see any justification for the usual expressions of extreme pessimism that follow every alarmist report in the media. I do, however, see an urgent need for higher spending and greater focus on education by the incoming government to make faster progress, particularly in closing the gender gap in school enrollment. A recent report about significant education successes in Punjab prepared by Sir Micheal Barber gives me hope that the PML (N) will perform better than the last government in responding to the challenge.
SimSim Humara ("Ours"), the new Pakistani edition of the original American TV classic Sesame Street, is expected to be launched this year for Pakistan's pre-school children, according to the Guardian newspaper.
Launched in 1969 as a program designed to enhance school readiness in low-income and minority children, Sesame Street was the first television series to attempt to teach an educational curriculum to children as young as two years of age. Sesame Street is not entirely new to Pakistani audiences - the original American version ran on local TV during the 1990s.
Sesame Street International already co-produces 18 localized versions in Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Kosovo, Mexico, Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Palestine, Russia, South Africa , and reaches millions of children in 120 nations around the world. The Indian adaptation called "Galli Galli Sim Sim" and Bangladeshi adaptation "Sisimpur" were both launched in late 2006 with USAID funding. Pakistan's SimSim Humara represents the 19th local adaptation of the 42 year old original American Classic.
Sim Sim Hamara will be set around a dhaba, Urdu name for a roadside tea shop, and it will show residents hanging out on their verandas. It will feature Rani, a cute six-year-old Muppet, the child of a peasant farmer, with pigtails, flowers in her hair and a smart blue-and-white school uniform. Other characters include an energetic woman, Baaji, who enjoys family time and tradition, and Baily, a hard-working donkey who longs to be a pop star. They'll speak entirely in local languages - Urdu and four regional languages of Balochi, Punjabi, Pashto, and Sindhi . The only monster from the original American version being retained is Elmo, the cheerful toddler, but he will be recast with new local personality touches. Each show will pick one word and one number to highlight.
Faizaan Peerzada, the head of a Pakistani theater group that is collaborating with Sesame Street's American creators, told McClatchy Newspapers: "The idea is to prepare and inspire a child to go on the path of learning. And inspire the parents of the child to think that the child must be educated". Peerzada added that "this is a very serious business, the education of the children of Pakistan at a critical time."
Funded by a $20 million grant by US AID (United States Agency For International Development), the show will be carried by the state-owned PTV channel which reaches every nook and corner of Pakistan. It will reach 3 million pre-school kids via television screens in their homes. In addition to 78 TV episodes in Urdu and 56 in regional languages, there will also be a radio show and several mobile TV vans to show the program in remote areas and a traveling Muppet road show to front public service messages, on issues such as health, to reach 95 million people.
It's an opportune moment for TV shows like SimSim Humara to ride the wave of the current media revolution sweeping the nation. It began ten years ago when Pakistan had just one television channel, according to the UK's Prospect Magazine. Today it has over 100. Together they have begun to open up a country long shrouded by political, moral and religious censorship—taking on the government, breaking social taboos and, most recently, pushing a new national consensus against the Taliban. The birth of privately owned commercial media has been enabled by the Musharraf-era deregulation, and funded by the tremendous growth in revenue from advertising targeted at the burgeoning urban middle class consumers. Analysts at Standard Charter Bank estimated in 2007 that Pakistan had 30 million people with incomes exceeding $10,000 a year. With television presence in over 16 million households accounting for 68% of the population in 2009, the electronic media have also helped inform and empower many rural Pakistanis, including women.
Larry Dolan, the director of the education office at USAID for Pakistan, told McClatchy that the expenditure on SimSim Humara is a valuable addition to the "series of different pots" of educational assistance the U.S. provides. "Teaching kids early on makes them much more successful when they get to school. And this program will have the capacity to encourage tolerance, which is so key to what we're trying to do here," he said.
Thirty years of research by Georgetown University Early Learning Project has shown that Sesame Street has made a huge positive impact on increasingly diverse American society.
Here is a summary of some of the key findings reported by Georgetown:
1. School-Readiness : In studies completed after Sesame Street's first two televised years, viewers experienced positive outcomes in the areas of alphabet and number knowledge, body part naming, form recognition, relational term understanding, and sorting and classification abilities.
2. Long-term Benefits : In a longitudinal study examining the long-term impact of preschool-aged viewing of Sesame Street, it was found that exposure to the program in the preschool years was significantly associated with secondary school achievement.
3. Social Impact : Sesame Street has also been evaluated with regard to its ability to teach prosocial behavior to young children. Some studies have shown that children were able to generalize demonstrated behaviors in free play situations (Zielinska & Chambers, 1995), while others have found that children were only able to imitate the behaviors in situations similar to those appearing on the program (Paulson, 1974). Sesame Street has also been successful in contributing to children's understandings of complex issues such as death, love, marriage, pregnancy, and race relations. (Fisch, Truglio, & Cole, 1999)
4. Sesame Street has proven to enhance academic skills and social behavior. Children's television based upon collaborative efforts to develop appropriate curricula for young viewers is now more prevalent than ever.
In addition to teaching basic reading and math skills, Pakistan desperately needs to instill in its people greater tolerance and acceptance of diversity to ensure a more pluralistic and peaceful society for genuine democracy to take root. It is my earnest hope that SimSim Humara and other shows like it will be carefully scripted and presented to lay the foundation to move Pakistan closer to Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah's vision of a peaceful, pluralistic and democratic Pakistan.
Although it's a subject I have often written about, this particular post about fighting child malnutrition is inspired by a recent email from Col. Pavan Nair, an Army officer turned social activist, and a patriotic Indian with a deep sense of service to those in the greatest need in his country and its neighborhood.
In 2009, the Indian government banned the import of Plumpy'Nut nutrient bar by UNICEF to treat moderate to severe acute malnutrition among Indian children. Defending the government action, Mr. Shreeranjan, the joint secretary of the Ministry of Women and Child Development, told the Reuters that "Nothing should come behind our back. Nothing should be done in the name of emergency when we have not declared an emergency."
Clearly, Mr. Sheeranjan does not see the food emergency that is causing almost half of India's children to be malnourished. According to UNICEF's State of the World's Children's report carried by the BBC, India has the worst indicators of child malnutrition in South Asia: 48% of under fives in India are stunted, compared to 43% in Bangladesh and 37% in Pakistan.
Meanwhile 30% of babies in India are born underweight, compared to 22% in Bangladesh and 19% in Pakistan. UNICEF calculates that 40% of all underweight babies in the world are Indian.
Malnutrition is the leading cause of death in children in developing countries, including India and Pakistan. According to World Health Organization about 60% of all deaths, occurring among children aged less than five years in developing countries, could be attributed to malnutrition.
Those who survive the trauma of early childhood malnutrition suffer various degrees of brain damage and continue to lack sufficient cognitive and motor skills later in life.
According to World Bank's HNP (Health and Nutrition) paper "India's Undernourished Children", here is some data on the scale of the problem India faces:
1. 47% of Indian children under 5 suffer from malnutrition. 2. 60 million in all, highest in the world. 3. Two million Indian children under 5 die each year. 4. At least one million of them die from low immunity attributable to malnutrition. 5. Ten million children out of the statistical range a year suffer from lack of motor and cognitive skills for the rest of their lives. 6. Most of the retardation occurs between two to three years of age.
In the face of such shocking data, what is particularly disturbing is the lack of focus in pursuing solutions to this problem that affects tens of millions of children in the developing world, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
If the governments, such as India, are concerned about dependence on foreign food imports, they need to have policies and plans in place to encourage development of local alternatives to what are called ready to use therapeutic food (RUTF) bars such as Plumpy'Nut made from fortified peanut paste.
Community-based therapeutic care is being pushed in Pakistan by an Agha Khan University project. It is an attempt to maximize broad impact through improved coverage, access, and cost-effectiveness of treatment for malnutrition. Such community-based nutrition packages can provide effective care to the majority of acutely malnourished children as outpatients, using techniques of community mobilization to engage the affected population and maximize coverage and compliance. Children with SAM without medical complications are treated in an outpatient therapeutic program with ready-to-use therapeutic food and routine medications. It proposes the use of Ready-to-use Therapeutic Food (RUTF) and Fortified Supplementary food for the treatment of moderate and severe malnutrition. The advantage of these commodities is that they are ready-to-use paste which does not need to be mixed with water, thereby avoiding the risk of bacterial proliferation in case of accidental contamination.
While the advantages of the RUTF solutions such as Plumpy'Nut and Cipla's generic equivalent Nutrinut are proven, the cost of such treatment needs to be made a lot more affordable than it is. A standard Plumpy'nut treatment goes for four weeks (twice a day) at a cost of 12 Euros in Africa. India's Cipla also makes a generic version of Plumpy'Nut. It's being used in Nepal for Nepali Rupees 52 (~75 US cents) for a 500 Kcal bar. At 92 grams net weight; 12.5 grams protein; 32.86 grams lipid). It has the same nutritional content of F-100 milk formula and plumpy’Nut.
On the extreme affordability front, Bangladesh is setting an example for others to follow. Bangladeshi Nobel Laureate Mohammad Younus's Grameen, in joint venture with Danone of France, is producing a special yogurt called Shakti Doi from pure full cream milk that contains protein, vitamins, iron, calcium, zinc and other micronutrients to fulfill the nutritional requirements of children of Bangladesh and contribute in improving their health. While 'Shakti Doi' (which means 'power yogurt') is primarily intended for children, it is also appropriate for adults. The price of each 80 gram cup of yogurt is only 5 takas, equivalent to Euro 0.05 (five cents). It is an affordable price even for the poor people of Bangladesh. It's locally made and significantly cheaper than Plumpy'Nut, costing about one-tenth of the cost of solutions offered outside Bangladesh.
In his email to me, Col. Nair has proposed a solution for India with the target cost of one Indian rupee or less. His solution seeks to address protein energy malnutrition (PEM), iron deficiency anemia (IDA), and vitamin A deficiency (VAD) found among Indian children. Nair's idea is to develop a nutrient bar consisting of locally produced oats mixed with honey and crushed peanuts weighing about 15-20 grams, and fortified with iron (50%), vitamin A (75%), vitamin B6 and B12 (25% each), vitamin C (50%), vitamin E (50%), Iodine (50%), zinc (50%), and other nutrients like biotin, folic acid, calcium, sodium and potassium.
I am not a nutritionist. However, I do think Col. Nair's proposal to develop a low-cost solution to address the massive problem of child malnutrition in India and Pakistan deserves a serious look and concrete follow-up. It's an opportunity for social entrepreneurs and the corporate sector to jump in with their creative energies and dollars to meet the challenge thrown by Col. Nair. Meeting this common challenge as joint India-Pakistan effort will ensure a better future for all south Asians, and bigger future profits from a brainy, healthy and highly productive next generation of Indians and Pakistanis.
In a recently published guest post on Haq's Musings, the author and Teach For India Fellow Rakesh Mani talks about his experience of volunteering with India's primary and secondary schools during the last six months.
Mani argues that "there has to be something wrong with Indian society for it to allow its children to be among the most deprived and malnourished in the world".
Mani laments the fact that "young kids are forced to submit to rote learning" and "they lose the critical consciousness they will need to intervene and transform their country in the years to come."
The author questions the wisdom of focusing exclusively on producing more scientists, doctors and engineers at the expense of focus on primary and secondary education in India, and asks "how can we sustain these specialized programs without building sturdy foundations at school? Or rather, what quality of engineers and scientists must we be producing at these institutes of excellence? Excluding the IITs, what percentage of Indian graduates are able to compete effectively in the global economy?"
This article focuses on the state of India's children, and raises fundamental questions about society's values. However, I find Mr. Mani's thoughts to be equally, if not more, applicable to Pakistan as well.
Under former President Musharraf, Pakistan followed India's lead by focusing on tertiary education with the higher education budget rising 10-15 fold in a short period of time. Unfortunately, there was no commensurate increase or focus on primary or secondary education, where the rates of return are known to be higher. As a result of the long neglect, Pakistan's primary and secondary public education is in shambles with insufficient funds, rampant corruption and ghost schools that exist only on paper with fictitious staff drawing salaries and perks.
Ranked at 141 on a list of 177 countries, Pakistan's human development ranking remains very low. Particularly alarming is the low primary school enrollment for girls which stands at about 30% in rural areas, where the majority of Pakistanis live. In fact, the South Asia average of primary school enrollment is pulled down by Pakistan, the only country in all of Asia and the Pacific with the lowest primary enrollment rate of 68 per cent in 2005. This is 12 percentage points lower than that of Maldives, which, at 80 per cent, has the second lowest rate in Asia and the Pacific. Low primary enrollment rate and poor health of children in Pakistan raise serious concerns about the future of the nation in terms of the continuing impact of low human development on its economic, social and political well-being.
This lack of focus on access and quality of children's education has resulted in the proliferation of madrassahs, some of which are highly radicalized, that fill the vacuum by offering a one-stop shop for poor children needing food, clothing, shelter, healthcare and basic education. Parents simply drop their children off at these madrassas, and essentially let these institutions raise their children, and brainwash the children in some cases.
As Pakistan now fights an existential battle against extremely violent radicals, many from the radical madrassas, the nation is now paying a heavy price for years of neglect.
Upon the urging of saner elements in Pakistan, and pressure from the alarmed world, a new education policy has recently been announced that will more than double education spending in Pakistan from about 3% of the GDP to 7%. If it is done correctly, instills proper values, and with transparency, then there can be hope for light at end of the tunnel for Pakistan's younger generation.
As a volunteer for "Teach For India", Mr. Mani is inspiring others by personal example. Teach For India is a nationwide movement of outstanding college graduates and young professionals who will commit two-years to teach full-time in under resourced schools and who will become lifelong leaders working from within various sectors toward the pursuit of equity in education.
There has to be something wrong with Indian society for it to allow its children to be among the most deprived and malnourished in the world. Across castes and social classes, there is so little attention given to the inalienable right of a child to enjoy a childhood of good health, education and a nutritious diet. How can we get a society of adults to be accountable for the treatment of its youngest citizens? Several reports from international organizations like UNICEF and the World Bank have been sharply critical of the abject failure of governance in health and education that has left Indian children way behind their counterparts in Sri Lanka, Nepal and even Bangladesh. According to some recent statistics, two million children below the age of five die every year in India. That’s one every fifteen seconds which, shamefully, is the highest figure in the world.
But let’s just focus on primary education for the moment. Through my own experiences of teaching in an under-resourced Bombay school for the last six months, some sights and sounds have become permanently etched in my mind – the family of five who cannot afford to send all their children to school, and therefore picked two, a girl and a boy; the beatings that a 3rd grade student can receive at home for scoring poorly on an exam that tests little more than memorization; young kids reciting poems in fluent English without understanding a word of what they’re saying.
But it’s quite apparent now that this factory-schooling model is not only dysfunctional but also destructive towards the myriad processes of human learning and growth. Pupils have to be encouraged to independently develop their own creative thinking processes. Curriculums have to be re-worked to foster a sense of competence, purpose and responsibility into students. And also equip them with a vital understanding of ethics and social responsibility.
As young kids are forced to submit to rote learning, they lose the critical consciousness they will need to intervene and transform their country in the years to come. As they embrace educational passivity, they will also more readily accept the imperfections and injustices their societies impose on them.
Ever since Jawaharlal Nehru decided in the early 50s to develop India’s higher education platform to compete technologically in the Cold War era, the importance of primary education in the country has been largely ignored. Instead the nation focused on building institutions that could produce more engineers, doctors and scientists. But how can we sustain these specialized programs without building sturdy foundations at school? Or rather, what quality of engineers and scientists must we be producing at these institutes of excellence? Excluding the IITs, what percentage of Indian graduates are able to compete effectively in the global economy?
As the Indian educational debate remains sharply focused on colleges and universities, it is worth remembering that elementary education is the foundation on which the promise of equal opportunity exists. Much work needs to be done towards making the primary education system accountable to the child for what she learns, and how she learns it. And we’re possibly in the worst of situations at the moment – more than 1 in 3 children who begin primary school will drop out before 5th grade and World Bank statistics show that less than 40% of Indian adolescents are attending secondary school. In this context, the new Right to Education Bill is being hailed as India’s great solution but alas, it is only a sketchy blueprint that has yet to be implemented effectively.
And then again, the bill only caters to children above the age of six. Meeting the nutritional and developmental needs of children under the age of six is critical for the educational journey they will undertake. But there is not enough public attention to this omission in the new bill.
For India’s children, things will clearly not change by themselves. If it takes a village to raise a child, it might take the whole nation to raise the ten million children born annually in India. There is a serious need for much more material that can be used for playful learning, and a need for more simple storybooks, which affluent children have easy access to. Urban slum children have no such resource, either at school or at home.
For a country like India, where almost 40% of the population is under the age of fifteen, this paints a highly disturbing long-term trend. And talking globally, 25% of the entire global workforce will be Indian in about twenty years – so be sure that the quality of education these kids receive is going to impact us all.
But perhaps this is not about numbers, or about economics. Maybe the harshness of the statistics tells us that there is something more sinister at play – that the dialog shouldn’t be about resources or economics at all but instead a debate on our values.
Author Rakesh Mani is a 2009 Teach for India fellow, working with low-income schools in Mumbai. He is also a New York-based investment banker, freelance writer and commentator who contributes to a variety of publications.
As a volunteer for "Teach For India", Mr. Mani is inspiring others by personal example. Teach For India is a nationwide movement of outstanding college graduates and young professionals who will commit two-years to teach full-time in under resourced schools and who will become lifelong leaders working from within various sectors toward the pursuit of equity in education.
While there is no Pakistani equivalent of "Teach For India", there are a number of organizations such Human Development Foundation (HDF) and Development in Literacy (DIL), and Greg Mortenson's Central Asia Institute, which are focusing on improving primary education and promoting literacy in Pakistan.
Riaz Haq's Note: This article focuses on the state of India's children, and raises fundamental questions about society's values. However, I find Mr. Mani's thoughts to be equally, if not more, applicable to Pakistan as well.
Under former President Musharraf, Pakistan followed India's lead by focusing on tertiary education with the higher education budget rising 10-15 fold in a short period of time.
Unfortunately, there was no commensurate increase or focus on primary or secondary education. As a result of the long neglect, Pakistan's primary and secondary public education is in shambles with insufficient funds, rampant corruption and ghost schools that exist only on paper with fictitious staff drawing salaries and perks.
This lack of focus on access and quality of children's education has resulted in the proliferation of madrassahs, some of which are highly radicalized, that fill the vacuum by offering a one-stop shop for poor children needing food, clothing, shelter, healthcare and basic education. Parents simply drop their children off at these madrassas, and essentially let these institutions raise their children, and brainwash the children in some cases.
As Pakistan now fights an existential battle against extremely violent radicals, many from the radical madrassas, the nation is now paying a heavy price for years of neglect.
Upon the urging of saner elements in Pakistan, and pressure from the alarmed world, a new education policy has recently been announced that will more than double education spending in Pakistan from about 3% of the GDP to 7%. If it is done correctly, instills proper values, and with transparency, then there can be hope for light be at end of the tunnel for Pakistan's younger generation.
Here's a video report about Pakistan's decrepit public education:
"This consistent pattern of readiness to inflict civilian casualties - often when striking targets that are not of vital military significance - suggests that Bush and other pro-life American leaders have less concern for the lives of innocent human beings in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, than they have for human embryos."
The preceding words, attributed to Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer, condemned the hypocrisy of President George W. Bush's policy of finding "collateral damage" to civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq acceptable, while forbidding the use of embryos for stem cell research on moral grounds. Almost three years have passed since Singer issued this condemnation, President Barack Hussein Obama has now replaced George W. Bush in the While House and the ban on the use of human embryos in stem cell research has been lifted. But the drone attacks causing increasing number of civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Pakistan have continued, even intensified recently.
In his new book "The Life You Can Save", Professor Singer continues with his theme of valuing life. Being a bioethicist, he begins his book by challenging the reader by quizzing about a situation involving the life of a child about to drown. He writes, "On your way to work, you pass a small pond. On hot days, children sometimes play in the pond, which is only about knee-deep. The weather's cool today, though, and the hour is early, so you are surprised to see a child splashing about in the pond. As you get closer, you see that it is a very young child, just a toddler, who is flailing about, unable to stay upright or walk out of the pond. You look for the parents or babysitter, but there is no one else around. The child is unable to keep his head above the water for more than a few seconds at a time. If you don't wade in and pull him out, he seems likely to drown. Wading in is easy and safe, but you will ruin the new shoes you bought only a few days ago, and get your suit wet and muddy. By the time you hand the child over to someone responsible for him, and change your clothes, you'll be late for work. What should you do?"
In a Princeton University course called Practical Ethics, the professor begins his class by talking about global poverty and asks his students what they think you should do in this situation. Predictably, they respond that you should save the child. "What about your shoes? And being late for work?" he asks them. They brush that aside. How could anyone consider a pair of shoes, or missing an hour or two at work, a good reason for not saving a child's life?
And yet, that's exactly what most of us are doing by ignoring the deaths of 27,000 poor children every day. Some die because they don't have enough to eat. More die from measles, malaria, diarrhea, and pneumonia, conditions that either don't exist in developed nations, or, if they do, are almost never fatal. The children are vulnerable to these diseases because they have no safe drinking water, or no sanitation, and because when they do fall ill, their parents can't afford any medical treatment.
More than a billion people in the world do not have access to safe drinking water. In Pakistan alone, 38.5 million people lack access to safe drinking water and 50.7 million people lack access to improved sanitation, according to published data. Pakistanis are facing unprecedented shortage of clean drinking water and electricity due to the lowest recorded levels of water in the country's dams, according to Pakistani Meteorological Department. The mortality rate for children under-five in Pakistan is 99 deaths per 1000 children, according to Global Health Council. About half of under-five deaths occur in six countries with large populations: India, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Pakistan and China. Water and sanitation related diseases are responsible for 60% of the total number of child mortality cases in Pakistan, with diarrheal diseases causing deaths of 200,000 under-five years’ children, every year. Unsafe drinking water is shown to lead to poverty through time spent by women and girls to fetch ‘drinkable’ water from long distances. The combination of unsafe water consumption and poor hygiene practices require treatments for water borne illnesses, decreased working days, and also contribute to lowering of educational achievement due to reduced school attendance by children.
Edhi Foundation, Hidaya Foundation, HDF, UNICEF, Oxfam, and many other organizations are working to reduce poverty and provide clean water and basic health care, and these efforts are reducing the toll. If the relief organizations had more money, they could do more, and more lives would be saved.
In addition to the charitable organizations, there are social entrepreneurs joining in the effort to try and alleviate the effects of poverty. Saafwater, Inc. is a startup helping people in Karachi, Pakistan with access to safe drinking water. The company founders, Sarah Bird, Saira Khwaja and Khalid Saiduddin, emerged as finalists in Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s 100k Entrepreneurship Competition in 2007, and received $10,000 to put the concept of SaafWater into practice.
Dr. Akhtar Hamid Khan is the force behind Orangi Pilot Project to help residents of Orangi Town, a katchi abadi (shanty town) in Karachi to help themselves. It has helped in a number of projects to build better low-cost housing, improve sanitation and establish schools with the participation of the community. “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” Acclaimed social scientist Dr. Akhtar Hameed Khan used to reference this well-known proverb (according to his son, Akbar Khan), as it quite fittingly represents his philosophy on community development.
Greg Mortenson, an American, has been working with the local villagers to help build schools and promote education in northern Pakistan. While he has raised funds from various sources, Mortenson has insisted on community involvement in his efforts. Because of community 'buy-in', which involves getting villages to donate free land, subsidized or free labor ('sweat equity'), free wood and resources, the schools have local support and have been able to avert retribution by the Taliban or other groups opposed to girls education.
To deal with ongoing water and electricity crises, a number of community-based micro hydro projects are being executed with the help of the Agha Khan Foundation in Pakistan's Northern Areas and NWFP. Within this region, out of a total of 137 micro-hydro plants, the AKRSP has established 28 micro-hydros with an installed capacity of 619kW. Initially, in 1986, these plants started as research and demonstration units. These projects were extended to Village Organizations (VOs) and became participatory projects. A Village Organization (VO) is a body of villagers who have organized themselves around a common interest.
After formation, each village organization signed a partnership with AKRSP to abide by all terms and conditions necessary for the village development. The entire responsibility of implementation was passed on to the VOs. AKRSP provided the negotiated cost of the plants and technical input required during the construction period. All the VOs completed the civil work of the plants. They purchased and transported machinery from other parts of Pakistan. The VO members provided subsidized or free unskilled labor and locally produced building material.
While the problems faced by Pakistan are huge, I believe that a serious and organized initiative by a tiny percentage of Pakistan's large middle class of at least 40-50m people can begin to make a difference with their time, effort and money. Pakistanis owe it to themselves and their poor brethren to step up and take responsibility for improving the situation of the most vulnerable citizens of their country. By practically demonstrating that they value life, the people of the region can hope to reduce the extreme violence and terrorism in the future when today's children will become tomorrow's adults. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. But we must persevere by taking one step after another until we see results.
We must learn to value life at home by our words and our deeds and then expect others to do the same.
Here's a video of Dr. Singer's interview with Riz Khan:
Not only has the low-budget movie "Slumdog Millionaire" drawn big crowds in the West and taken in more than $ 100m at the box office, the movie has won eight Oscars last night, including the Academy awards for the Best Picture and the Best Director. The Best Music and Best Song awards went to India's musician A.R. Rahman, known as the Mozart of Madras. Rahman enthralled his celebrity audience at Kodak theater as well as the international viewers with his live performance of the popular songs "O Saya" and "Jai Ho" from Slumdog.
Half the world away in the early morning hours in Mumbai, the Garib Nagar crowd was particularly excited because several children from the area, including Rubina Ali, 9, and Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, 10, starred in "Slumdog Millionaire," playing the roles of "young Latika" and "young Salim" respectively. "Woo-hoo!" they screamed, alternately chanting, cheering and bursting into singing "Jai Ho" the theme song of the film, according to ABC News.
After the well-deserved success of the well-made Slumdog movie, will the lives of poor children in Mumbai improve? Can this extraordinary focus on child poverty translate in to positive actions to reduce poverty around the world? These are the most important questions on the minds of many after the euphoria in Los Angeles.
Decried by many as "racist poverty porn" and condemned by Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachan in his blog for showing India as "a third world dirty under belly developing nation (sic)", the movie Slumdog Millionaire has been greeted by howls of protests in India. But it has been widely acclaimed in the West. It is sparking international interest in the vast slums of Mumbai. With the box office success of the film, there have been charges of child exploitation against Slumdog producer and director which have been denied by Danny Boyle. “The actors were paid very well. We have not released any figures — either what they were paid or what they will receive when they complete their education — because it would make them vulnerable to certain elements, because they are quite large sums of money.”
Reports suggest the stars are entitled to a trust fund if they have remained in education for a certain length of time. The production company wanted to make sure the child actors would benefit from a decent education as well as the money, he said. Slumdog was not the only Academy Award contender focusing on poverty, squalor and its effects in India. Another documentary "The Final Inch" -- also nominated for an Academy Award -- takes a real-life look at India's slums. The film explores the final battle against polio, a largely forgotten disease that continues to ravage the world's poorest areas -- areas that the Hollywood feature so graphically depicts.
Poverty tours in India, Brazil and South Africa are not an entirely new phenomenon. Favela tours in Rio De Janeiro in Brazil and South African shanty town tours have attracted tourists for years. It is primarily the popular Slumdog Millionaire, nominated for 10 Oscars including Best Picture award, that is translating to more rubberneckers in the Mumbai, India, slum where it was filmed — and is re-igniting a debate over the ethics of "poverty tourism", according to USA Today. Chris Way, the co-founder of Reality Tours that operates the poverty tour of the Mumbai slum, estimates that sales are up by about 25% since Slumdog Millionaire's release. Though he credits some of the increase to a gradual rebound in tourism after terrorist attacks in Mumbai killed more than 170 people in November, publicity surrounding the film has played a big role.
The tours have come under criticism for exploiting poverty. But Way defends his tours as a way to help the poor in Mumbai. In India, "a lot of people think the movie is 'poverty porn,' " says Way, a Brit who has lived in Mumbai since 2004. But any criticism of his tours "comes from misunderstanding what we are trying to do … break down the negative image of slums, (and) highlight the industry and sense of community." Reality Tours charges $10 or $20 a person, depending on length of the tour, and pledges to donate 80% of after-tax profits to local charities. Though the business hasn't yet cleared a profit, it paid for a community center.
Child poverty is not unique to India. MSNBC recently reported that the worsening economy in Pakistan is especially taking its toll on children and some are being abandoned by their parents. The report highlighted the case of three mothers who could not afford to feed their children. "The three women came together to my center," Bilquis Edhi of Edhi Center said. "They asked me to please take their children; they could no longer feed them."
"The mothers were sobbing as they tried to leave the children and the children were crying clinging to their mothers," Edhi said. "It was heart wrenching to watch."
While the news of abandoned or begging children offers only a small anecdotal evidence of the sorry state of Pakistani children, the official data paints an equally grim picture. Ranked at 136 on a list of 177 countries, Pakistan's human development ranking remains very low. Particularly alarming is the low primary school enrollment for girls which stands at about 30% in rural areas, where the majority of Pakistanis live. In fact, the South Asia average of primary school enrollment is pulled down by Pakistan, the only country in all of Asia and the Pacific with the lowest primary enrollment rate of 68 per cent in 2005. This is 12 percentage points lower than that of Maldives, which, at 80 per cent, has the second lowest rate in Asia and the Pacific. Low primary enrollment rate and poor health of children in Pakistan raise serious concerns about the future of the nation in terms of the continuing impact of low human development on its economic, social and political well-being.
According to Asia Children's Rights report, about 8 million Pakistani children, or 40 percent of the total population of children under the age of 5, suffer from malnutrition. About 63 percent of children between 6 months and 3 years have stunted growth and 42 percent are anemic or underweight. Poor nutrition leaves these children vulnerable to diseases. Pakistan is among the few countries of the world where Polio is still endemic. Poor conditions extend to the education sector as well. Over 23 million children in Pakistan have never been to school. The International Labor Organization data shows 3.3 million children, between the ages of 5 and 14 years in Pakistan, are forced to work rather than attend school. A quarter of a million of them work as domestic servants. The most recent United Nations Human Development Report indicates that the youth literacy rate in Pakistan is an abysmal 58 percent, among the lowest in the world. Sexual abuse is another problem. Homelessness of children is quite common. Over 10,000 children below the age of 15 live on the streets and sidewalks of Karachi alone. Many of them are forced to beg for survival. Most of these children say they left home because of domestic violence and family financial problems, according to Edhi Foundation which cares for some of them. According to a report by Amnesty International, there are more than 4,500 juvenile prisoners in Pakistani jails and 66 percent of them are being tried. Juvenile detainees are kept with adults, leaving them vulnerable to sexual and physical abuse.
I hope that the growing interest in Mumbai slums goes beyond a temporary fad and a fleeting voyeuristic exercise. This extraordinary interest should translate into action to help the people of the slums escape the abject poverty and squalor that define them and their daily existence. Jeff Greenwald, executive director of EthicalTraveler.org, put it well when he spoke with USA Today. "If one takes such a tour out of a genuine desire to learn and a passion for social justice, the experience can be valuable, eye-opening, even life-changing. If one goes as a spectator, it's little different than a visit to the zoo," he said.
This opportunity of global interest in child poverty should not be wasted. Instead, it should spur the Slumdog director to set up a foundation with some of the proceeds from the film to champion the cause of poor children with UNICEF in South Asia and the rest of the world.
A recent issue of San Jose Mercury News has a pictorial about grinding poverty in India done by John Boudreau and Dai Sugano. This heartbreaking pictorial illustrates the extent of the problem that India faces, a problem that could potentially be very destabilizing and put the entire society at the risk of widespread chaos and violence.
