Shelley Nason – March 2013
SHELLEY NASON, based in London, is Executive Director of Resource Development (for Europe and the Middle East) for the Aga Khan University. She has previously held senior fundraising positions at London Business School and the University of Chicago.
Excerpts:
[L]ast month, there I was – under armed guard in Karachi – shuttling back and forth by bus for a week visiting the Aga Khan University’s Schools of Medicine and Nursing and its post-graduate Institute for Educational Development. I’m a resource-development officer for AKU. The visit to Pakistan was my first.
Pakistan has a serious education problem, not only in Swat. According to some statistics, roughly 40% of Pakistan’s school-age children and adolescents did not attend school in 2011. Other statistics put it closer to 50%. That’s as many as 35 million young people between the ages of 5 and 19 going without basic education – in a country plagued by growing jihadism, and the world’s fastest-growing nuclear arsenal.
…
The country as a whole is also plagued by tens of thousands of “ghost schools” – schools which, in some cases, exist only in file drawers. In other instances, actual school buildings now shelter cattle and other livestock in what were formerly classrooms and schoolyards. Or they’re used as private residences, office buildings, or government bureaus. These “schools” nevertheless “employ” teachers who draw salaries, but never show up to teach. Money nonetheless flows in to subsidize “student” fees and to pay for infrastructural “maintenance” and phantom “upgrades.”
…
In some ways, the postgraduate students from AKU’s Institute for Educational Development (IED) were the most impressive. Many had come from classrooms across Pakistan where they’d experienced conditions little better than some I’ve described above. Yet in making their way to AKU-IED, they seemed to be declaring an unshakeable belief in the possibility of a change for the better for their country’s schools, and in their ability to contribute to that change. Their energy and idealism have proven irresistible. As a recent initiate into the vast, complex and multilayered domains inhabited by professional educationalists and educational theorists, I returned wanting to know more.
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