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Pakistan ranks 5th amongst countries that spent the least on Education. Strong political will needed to meet education challenges: ILMOAGAHI

Lahore – 23 June, 2014 – “Pakistan needed strong political will to
meet education challenges and rapidly deploy new resources to achieve
some quick wins. After the devolution of powers to provinces, one of
the alarming factor is that a substantial amount of allocated budget
on education is remained unspent. It was the consensus at editors’
round table meeting organized by ILMOAGAHI in Lahore today. A number
of senior journalist, editors and news directors from main stream
newspapers and leading TV channels participated in the meeting.
Meeting was organized by Mishal Pakistan in collaboration with Ilm
Ideas. Earlier today a training workshop on education journalism was
also organized and attended by more than 25 education reporters from
various mainstream news organization.

According to Alif Aillan, currently Pakistan has the world’s second
highest number of out of school children at the primary level. Every
12th out of school child in the world is Pakistani.

President AGAHI, Puruesh Chaudhary, while sharing her views at this
occasion said that despite the government’s pre-election promise to
raise the share of education allocation to 4% of GDP, Pakistan still
spends a meagre 1.9% on education. Due to such low expenditure,
Pakistan ranks fifth amongst countries that spend the least on
education.

While sharing his views, senior journalist and lead trainer ILMOAGAHI
Mubashir Zaidi said Pakistani media lacks framework to appreciate
quality journalism on education and sources of doing good journalism
story are also crucial but both journalists and policy makers should
start using data on education to improve state of education in
Pakistan. “Teachers should encourage to research and interact with
media to discuss the education challenges in Pakistan” he added.

The objective of ILMOAGAHI initiative is to improve accountability and
media coverage of priority education issues and consensus building on
education policies by engaging media.
Through the ILM-o-AGAHI initiative, 18 education journalism workshops
were held across Pakistan during last two months for education
reporters to increase their capacity and improve the coverage on
education issues in media. In each workshop, more than 30 education
reporters participated where their capacity to report on identified
educational challenges enhanced and  improved understanding and skills
among journalists to capture community’s perspective and voice
including children’s voice.

Mishal Pakistan is the partner institute of the Center for
International Media Ethics and the Global Competitiveness and
Benchmarking Networks of the World Economic Forum. Mishal assists the
forum in creating soft-data on Pakistan, identifying Pakistan’s
competitiveness challenges including primary health & education and
higher education.

For Press Release in Urdu Click Here
For more information please visit: www.ilmoagahi.org

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