In spite of the progress that has been made to date, Pakistan’s education sector is one of the most underdeveloped in the world. Every tenth child worldwide that goes without schooling is a Pakistan national. Scarcely more than half of all five- to nine-year-old boys and girls attend school. For girls especially, school attendance is fraught with limitations. Teaching staff are poorly trained and unmotivated, which leads to disorganised and teacher-centred teaching. Teaching materials, and text books in particular, are out of date and do not begin to comply with modern-day standards. The upshot is that parents see little point in sending their children to school. To make matters worse, many poverty-stricken parents are barely able to afford an education for their children.

Given this situation, GIZ, working on a mandate from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), has been engaged in the basic education sector in Pakistan for many years. Its focal points of activity include education planning, curricula, text books and teacher training; their objective is to improve institutional conditions and thus raise the quality of education. The goal is to give children and young people a better quality education that is relevant to the environment in which they live. Support targets all administrative levels, from the federal level through the province and district levels down to the individual schools. In addition to support at the federal level, activities focus on the provinces of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab as well as on the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.

German support for syllabus and curriculum reform and for the development of a national education and textbook policy has been extremely successful to date. GIZ has also played a decisive role in setting up a teacher training system in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. In the education sector especially, it takes a long time for improvements to make themselves felt. For this reason, the main thrust of ongoing consultancy continues to be on promoting the development of competences and potential (capacity development). Systematic needs analyses and the design and roll-out of sector development plans are, in the long term, intended to empower our partners to do their job efficiently and without any external assistance.

The vocational education sector is facing similar difficulties to those besetting basic education. The majority of people in Pakistan are not sufficiently trained to meet industrial and business standards. In response, vocational education was expanded at the end of 2010. Together with the Netherlands and the EU, GIZ is advising the National Vocational & Technical Education Commission on the implementation of the National Qualification Strategy as well as on sweeping reforms in vocational education. The programme, which GIZ is executing in delegated partnership, is initially scheduled to run for a period of five years.