[:en]BY ASIM SHAHZAD
LAHORE: SAHE has organized a roundtable dusscussion on Supporting Girls Education: BISP’s Taleemi Wazaif as a Social Protection in Lahore.
Minister for Education Rana Sikander Hayat and others including Shaheen Atiq, Abbas Rashid,Uzma Kardaar, Senator Afrasiyab Khatak ,Faisal Bari and others participate in disscussion .
Executive Director Abbas Rashid said that Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP), the largest social protection initiative in Pakistan has been assisting eligible poor families through the Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programme in the form of Taleemi Wazaif (TW) for all BISP beneficiary households, to support primary schooling and more recently has moved on to supporting middle school education. This is a welcome development but it comes with its own challenges, not least by way of access and mobility.
SAHE has used BISP CCT/Taleemi Wazaif (TW) data to explore issues related to girls attending middle school in Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), and Balochistan, in Grade 6 (or beyond).
“We have focused on girls whose families were receiving BISP support in the form of TW at the primary school level. The study used a mixed-methods approach engaging the parents of around 2,000 girls and sought responses relating to beneficiaries’ economic status, educational background, transport options, safety concerns, and overall affordability in the context of future prospects for their girls’ education,” the executive ddirector said.
“Our findings indicate that the TW support plays an important role in helping girls transition from primary to middle schooling even as many more families, given the state of the economy, appear poised to fall within the purview of the National Socio-economic Registry (NSER), underscoring the need for greater funding for TW/BISP as well as other social protection programs,” he said.
In particular, the cost involved in girls’ middle school transportation has risen significantly, which has become a concern for parents.
The key question of where such funding can possibly come from in these difficult times is one that we aim to deliberate on as part of the Roundtable, to carry forward the conversation among practitioners, parliamentarians, and policy-makers relating to the enhancement of financial commitment for the education sector and the need to review and redirect the high levels of subsidy across various sectors available to high-income groups, he concluded.[:]
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