Sindh Education and Literacy Minister Jam Mahtab Hussain officially launched the Sindh Non-Formal Education Policy (NFE) on Wednesday. The NFE was earlier approved by Sindh Cabinet on October 5, 2017. School Education and Literacy Department (SELD) Secretary Iqbal Durrani, USAID Deputy Mission Director John Smith-Sreen and representatives of other development agencies like UNICEF and JICA attended the event.
While speaking at the event, Sindh NFE Director Mohammad Alam Thaheem explained the inexorable consultative process of materialising the suggestions into an approved policy.
Thaheem opined that the policy was essential to ameliorate the literacy rate in Sindh. He also said that main goal of NFE was to create a link between formal and non-formal education to accomplish the required education goals of secondary education, eradication of gender and ethnic gaps and compete with universal adult literacy rate.
SELD Secretary Durrani emphasised the need for successful implementation of the NFE. He said non-formal education was targeted to increase the low literacy rate and educate the out-of-school children to expedite the achievement of targets set by Article 25A of the constitution and Sustainable Development Goal 4 in the province.
USAID Deputy Mission Director John Smith-Sreen highlighted that Pakistan had one of the highest youth population in the world. Hence any investment for the education would be the most appropriate, and he declared it as one of the reason for USAID’s support to Pakistan. He applauded the Sindh Government and all other participants in preparing the policy and resolved to support its implementation.
Sindh Capacity Development Project Chief Abdus Sami Khan shared salient features of the NFE policy and explained its linkages with the formal education. He said that institutionalisation of various processes, planning based on information collected from the data of out-of-school children and adult literacy would be done before spending money. He further highlighted that the policy was focused on reducing the number of out-of-school children, teachers training, development of standards, learners attendance and details and enhancing adult literacy rates.