A blackboard placed against a wall, some charts hanging on the side walls, and some chairs placed in the room without any order: it appeared to be a classroom, though it was situated in a private residential building.

Later, it transpired that a widow had established an education centre in one room of her rented house. She wanted to make literate children under 15 years of age in that katchi abadi of Karachi, who could not go to school to get an education for some reason. Before launching her centre for informal education for both girls and boys, Madam Zaib, as she was called by her students, visited almost every house of Kausar Niazi Colony in the North Nazimabad area of Karachi. She requested parents to send their children to her “school”, where they would be taught how to read and write for free.

In the beginning, the response was very poor. People were suspicious of her intentions. Why was she insisting on making the poor kids literate?

They were reluctant to send their children to her. However, soon they realised she was a sincere and kind-hearted woman, who wanted only to educate kids who were out-of-school because of poverty, or some other reasons.

Within a year, more than 25 students started coming to Madam Zaib’s school, mostly females in the age group of 7 to 14 years. And this centre of informal education has been running successfully for more than three years, imparting education to poor children, free of cost.

Madam Zaib’s school is not the only school of its kind. There are tens of hundreds of such centres being run in various major cities and towns of the country, mostly by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and individuals. These informal education centres are as important as those established for formal education, working in public and private sectors.

The government of Pakistan is constitutionally committed to providing education to all. The State shall “remove illiteracy and provide free and compulsory secondary education within the minimum possible period”, reads Article 37-B, Constitution of Pakistan 1973. In this context, Pakistan is required to meet the challenges of providing free and compulsory basic education to all children and adults, utilising all available financial, technical and human resources to extend the necessary education opportunities, through formal as well as informal means. In this effort, it has relied on technical and other support mechanisms available under the Education For All (EFA) plans and other related initiatives.

Technically, informal education comprises all those educational activities (at all levels such as primary education, vocational training, adult literacy, functional literacy, etc.) which fall “outside” the purview of the formal standardised education system, endorsed by the government of Pakistan or an international examination syndicate/board.

In Pakistan, informal education is generally provided through informal basic education community or “home schools”, vocational/skill training centres/ institutes, adult literacy/functional literacy centres, and “deeni madrasas” or religious schools.

It is generally alleged that formal educational institutions have failed to deliver, and its proof is that hundreds of thousands of children are still out of school. That’s why the importance of informal education programmes has always been felt. Various programmes have been launched in the past also.

One such major initiative was the National Education Policy (1998-2010), which envisaged “democratisation of education through the expansion of elementary education, including formal and non-formal methods and expanded programs of adult education, literacy and functional literacy programmes, as a basic requirement for economic development, modernisation of social structures and providing equality of opportunity for all citizens.”

Non-formal Basic Education (NFBE) was initially launched in the 1950s, under the adult literacy programme. During the 1970s, the concept was more vigorously pursued, but the results were not encouraging.

Over the years, several informal literacy programmes were launched, such as the Village AID Programme (1953), Literacy Programmes under Basic Democracies (1964-69), Experimental Pilot Projects (1977-78), Iqra Pilot Programme (1987), Nai Roshni Schools (1987-89) and the Quranic Literacy Project (1992-94), but despite common concepts, common literacy training, common materials and common strategy, these lacked innovation and did not account for cultural and social factors. The key problem was the absence of any institutional linkage between informal basic education programmes and formal education programmes.

The Prime Minister’s Literacy Commission in 1995 formulated a project titled “Establishment of 10,000 Non-formal Basic Education Schools” at a total cost of Rs. 1,263.375 million. The project, based on the idea of a home school to be run through NGOs and CBOs, was to be implemented within a period of five years. However, the project suffered due to financial constraints.

The National Education Policy (1998-2010) recommended expanding the programme to a larger scale, by opening 75,000 NFBE Community Schools during the next three years. The Prime Minister of Pakistan, while announcing the National Agenda, had emphasised universal literacy for children and constituted a committee for preparation of an action plan. The action plan also recommended the expansion of the NFBE community schools programme. The ECNEC approved the expansion of the programme on July 11, 1998, from 7,000 to 82,000 NFBE community schools at a total budget of Rs. 11,214.898 million. However, neither any action was taken nor any allocation made for the purpose. At present, the total enrolment in the existing NFBE schools is around 214,000.

A meeting held at the National Commission for Human Development (NCHD) head office in Islamabad under Chairman Col. (retd) Dr. Amirrullah Marwat on February 15, 2022, was told that an agreement had been signed with UNICEF for launching informal schools in 20 districts of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. The NCHD had already launched a project ‘Leave no girls behind’ in Lakki Marwat under the programme.

Another meeting held on June 29, 2021, discussed the possibility of collaboration for the Adult Literacy and Numeracy Skills (ALNS) project in two districts of Sindh under the Sindh Union Council and Community Economic Strengthening Support (SUCCESS) Programme.

The NCHD initiatives are good but their scope is still limited. By applying the equity-based approach to education where most vulnerable and disadvantaged children are provided with access to quality education, Pakistan can greatly accelerate its progress towards achieving the goal of educating all its children, by launching informal educational institutions.