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A
research and policy dialogue on key issues in education was organized
by Aga Khan University Institute for Educational Development
(AKU-IED) in Islamabad, from July 10 to12, 2002.
The
purpose of the dialogue was to share the experiences of devolution
and decentralization in the education sector from across the country,
identify key lessons, issues and challenges so far, and discuss
what could be done to ensure that decentralization does lead to
improvement in the access and quality of education available to
our children.
Speaking on the occasion, keynote speaker, Mr.
Imtiaz Gillani, Minister for Education, NWFP, highlighted the significance
of decentralization, giving references to the structural changes
that had recently been made in NWFP's education sector. He said
a new mechanism was in place in the form of district level committees
that prevented one person from having full decision-making powers.
He said that "while a central mechanism is necessary, things
work better decentralized."
Describing devolution better as a mindset of
'sharing of power', former minister for education, Sindh, Prof.
Anita Ghulam Ali, suggested that "if we begin to adopt this
kind of mindset, the people will really be talking about decentralization
and improvement in education." Underscoring the need for a
stable middle class, she said, "For many decades, we've been
talking about developing a stable middle class, but have never been
able to do it for various reasons, one of which is that we never
really believed that it's a stable middle class that proves to be
a sustainable factor in everything a government does." She
said the workshop "would be helpful to the people who are going
to come after the October elections; and it should be the people
who will tell the policy-makers what they want, through lessons
learnt from the community experiences across Pakistan."
Welcoming the participants, Dr. Gordon Macleod,
Director, AKU-IED, said "the dialogue might not necessarily
achieve instant results, but it would at least initiate a process
of further interactions among researchers and policy-makers. "Working
as collaborators, they
will identify questions, find ways of doing research, and will work
out how those results might be used in the joint development of
policies," he added.
During the two-day sessions, the discussions
produced questions ranging from whether decentralization was desirable
in the first place, to questions of the extent of autonomy teachers
should be given without compromising on the quality of education.
Summarizing the dialogue, Dr. Iffat Farah, Head
of Research and Policies, AKU-IED, said that in trying to hold such
dialogues, "AKU-IED has started a process which not only gives
people opportunities for discussions with each other, but also allows
researchers, policy-makers and implementers to sit together and
think of the contributions they can make." "The decentralized
system has its challenges but has its opportunities as well …
we need to see how each of us, universities included, can make an
input into the process - if the government is wanting to re-structure,
how can we contribute to that re-structuring," she concluded.
Participants included policy-makers from federal,
provincial and district levels in the government, as well as researchers
and implementers from both public and private sectors, and representatives
of NGOs. The programme included paper presentations and sessions
where representatives of the four provinces shared their experiences
of the decentralization process in their respective provinces.
This programme was the second of a series of
dialogues on key issues in education. A similar dialogue had earlier
been held in Karachi on teacher education in April 2002. Future
dialogues will be based on the themes of curriculum reform and quality
assurance.
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