KARACHI: Pakistan ranks second with the most out-of-school children in the world with only Nigeria ahead of it, said a child rights body yesterday.
In its annual report titled “The state of Pakistan’s children 2012”, the Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Child (Sparc) said about one-fourth of the 19.75 million children in Pakistan aged five to nine were out of school and factoring in adolescents increased the number to 25 million. Of them, seven million children (aged three to five) had yet to receive primary schooling.
“The country reduced its spending on education from 2.6 percent to 2.3 percent of the GNP (gross national product) over the decade and ranks 113th of the 120 countries on the Education Development Index,” said the Sparc report launched in a hotel here yesterday. At the provincial level, Punjab has the highest NER (net enrolment rate) for children in primary schools at 61 percent followed by Sindh with 53 percent, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa with 51 percent and Balochistan with the lowest at 47 percent.
Pakistan has an NER of 74.lpc for all age groups enrolled either in primary, secondary or higher education.
Pakistan has the lowest youth literacy rate with 70.7 percent. Only 61 percent of girls are literate as compared to 79 percent boys in the age group of 15-24 years.
Progress has been slowest in low-income countries, especially Pakistan, where only 15 percent children received pre-primary education in 2010.
It quoted a recent report saying 63 percent of children aged three to five years were not receiving any education related to early childhood development.
The country ranks 129th among the 135 countries on the Gender Gap Index 2012 according to the Global Gender Gap Report. Data shows that gender parity for primary schools in Azad Kashmir is close to 1 (0.97). The GPI for Punjab stands at 0.98, in Balochistan it is 0.83 and in Sindh 0.81.
The report said 43 percent children born in Pakistan were afflicted with stunting. It was estimated that 21.7pc children were severely and 21.3pc were moderately stunted. It quoted the United Nations Children’s Fund as saying that under five years mortality rate had declined from 122 per 1,000 births in 1990 to 72 per 1,000 births in 2011; far from reaching the assigned target of 52 per 1,000 births as per the millennium development goal.
More than 423,000 children die before reaching their fifth birthday, and almost one in five of these deaths are due to pneumonia.
Pakistan accounted for nearly 30pc of all polio cases recorded worldwide. A total of 142 cases were reported in 2010; 198 cases in 2011. In 2012, the official reports show, 58 cases were recorded, excluding cases in the North and South Waziristan agencies.
It is estimated that 2.1 million cases of measles are reported annually in Pakistan and 21,000 of the reported cases die of complications from the disease.
Pneumonia and diarrhoea account for 29 percent of deaths among children under five worldwide or more than two million a year; with Pakistan ranking fourth among the countries with the highest prevalence of the disease. Internews
