But the MDGs goal to achieve ‘education
for all’ faltered. A few countries, including
Rwanda, Vietnam, and Bolivia, had successfully improved access to education, but the
number of girls out of school in the world has
increased since 2007. The dropout rate for
girls after puberty remains extremely high,
and access to higher education is still just a
dream for tens of millions of people
MILLENNIUM DEVELOPMENT
GOAL SUCCESSES
CHILD MORTALITY: Declined from
12.7 million in 1990 to 6.9 million
deaths in 2015, according to the
World Health Organization.
After the India-Pakistan partition in 1947,
the first Pakistan census in 1950 found the
overall literacy rate in Pakistan was 14 percent, according to UNESCO. Sixty years
later, in 2014, the Pakistan Economic Survey
reported Pakistan’s literacy rate at just 58 percent, far short of the 88 percent MDG target.
And tragically, the literacy rates for women
and girls — especially in rural areas — is as
low as 23 percent, according to UNICEF.
More alarming, girls’ education has been
more targeted around the world recently. Recent tragedies include the murder of
12 children at Escola Municipal Tasso da
Silveira school, Rio De Janiero, Brazil in April
2011; the Taliban’s 2012 attempted murder
of Malala; the terrorist group Boko Haram’s
kidnapping of about 300 high school girls in
northeast Nigeria in 2014; multiple incidents
of poisoning and gassing Afghan schoolgirls; hundreds of girls’ schools bombed in
Pakistan and Afghanistan, including the two
bombings of CAI schools and murder of CAI
school headmaster Ghulam Farooq in Kunar
province; and the ongoing horrific rapes, abductions, and attacks on girls and women by
ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq.
The only way forward is to keep investing in girls’ education. The colossal hurdles
posed by family, culture, government, economics, and logistics seem daunting. Yet we
know what it will take to clear those hurdles:
a steady supply of female teachers, adequate
FALL 2015
sanitation and toilets, good lighting, sufficient boundary walls and security to ensure
the girls are safe, well-trained and caring
teachers, and parents who believe in educating their daughters and sons.
And change is happening, albeit slowly.
“It is easy to get girls in school nowadays
from when I first started 15 years ago, but
still some problem to keep some girls in
school,” said Mohammed Nazir, Central Asia
Educational Trust (CAET) field director in
Baltistan, Pakistan. “Sometimes girls, when
reach marriage age, their father wants to
marry them [off], or not allow them to go in
school with boys. But slowly, inshallah, it is
changing fo