World View : Closing the Education Gap for Women : Pakistan typifies the Third World's prejudice and promise in grappling with the problem.

By JOHN-THOR DAHLBURG

April 12, 1994 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

CHHOI, Pakistan —

Shazia Bibi sat with her friends in a cool dim room, her toes wriggling in dust as brown and fine as cocoa. Her brow furrowing in concentration, the village girl spat on her slate and wiped it clean with her white shawl.

Then, clutching a stone, the dark-eyed 10-year-old did something no female in her family has ever been able to do: In the graceful curving script of the Urdu language, she etched the words morning , day and night on the small black square.

The three dozen girls sitting with Shazia in the single-room, dirt-floor schoolhouse tried their best to do likewise, and in the parched wheat lands of Pakistan, such an abundance of learned females was little short of a miracle.

Pakistan may be a nation governed by an urbane woman who attended both Harvard and Oxford, but a feudal society, widespread poverty and prejudice have kept 79% of Pakistani females from receiving any formal education. The brutishness that brings to the lives of tens of millions is barely describable. The assorted costs to this Texas-sized country or the others where female literacy is very low can only be guessed at.

“Before the school was here, if a letter came, it had to be kept until a male member of the family came home to read it,” said Hamida Noor, 25, the sole teacher at the Chhoi village school for girls. “Now the girls can read it. Some can even read a newspaper. And if a small brother or sister gets sick, they can read the medicine bottle and see what dose to give. Before, they just used to guess.”

The school here and 32 others sprinkled across the impoverished Mianwali district of northwestern Punjab exist because a retired army colonel wanted to do something to perpetuate his father’s memory and to help people of his region.

But teaching girls to read and write has also become a priority for Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s government, which took power last October. That commitment coincides with studies showing female literacy to be an ironclad requirement for the advance of a society, whether it be in South Asia or southern Africa or anywhere else in the developing world.

“Investing in women’s education is a sine qua non for the achievement of sustainable development,” Dr. Nafis Sadik, a Pakistani physician who is executive director of the United Nations Population Fund, told an international meeting on education held in New Delhi, India, last December. “Educating women delivers the highest return of any development input.”

In a recent study of 166 countries, Washington-based Population Action International found a persistent correlation between the length of women’s schooling, their birth rates, child survival, family health and a nation’s overall prosperity. PAI promotes population control through unrestricted access to family planning.

At the top of the scale, PAI found, was France, where almost all girls are enrolled in secondary school and women average more than 11 years of education. At the bottom was the landlocked African nation of Chad, where adult women have, on average, less than one month of schooling.

Such research provides a sobering reminder of how many women in the Third World are intentionally kept in ignorance. In 50 countries, Pakistan among them, a total of 76 million fewer girls than boys are enrolled in primary and secondary school, resulting in a yawning “gender gap” of education, the group calculated.

“There is definitely a feeling of ‘why educate girls at all,’ ” observed Attiya Inayatullah, a member of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organzation’s executive board from Pakistan.

By itself, India, Pakistan’s far bigger neighbor, accounted for more than two-fifths of that gender disparity in enrollment, with 33 million fewer girls than boys in primary and secondary school. As in Pakistan, families in India often make daughters stay home and work.

“A child in a rural setting becomes an asset at as tender an age as 6,” Indian Finance Minister Manmohan Singh, himself the product of a village school in Punjab, has remarked. “If you have a girl child, she can look after her younger brothers and sisters.”

In an age where knowledge is axiomatic with power, women are the main victims of illiteracy. One out of every three adult women cannot read or write, according to UNESCO, compared to one out of every five males in a world of general balance between the genders. In Pakistan, one woman in four can read and write.

Of the estimated 948 million adult illiterates, nearly two-thirds are women, UNESCO says. Although the number of illiterates should dwindle by 7 million by the end of the century, women’s larger share should essentially remain constant.

The costs of such widespread ignorance are varied and great. Evidence has shown that with each additional year of schooling received by a mother, child mortality drops 5% to 10%. In India, studies have shown that women who complete high school earn one and a half times more than those without education.

“It is basically very simple. When women become literate and tolerant, their children become literate and tolerant,” UNESCO Director General Federico Mayor has said. “Keeping girls at home while boys go to school is the biggest mistake of all.”

Link to Birthrate

Here in Pakistan, one of the countries where the chasm between the sexes is widest and schools are customarily single-sex, 4.4 million fewer girls than boys attend class. The gender gap virtually guarantees that a galloping birthrate, which threatens to double Pakistan’s population in 23 years, will keep running full-throttle. A study by the National Institute of Population Studies has established that while a woman with seven or more years of education bears three children in her lifetime, the average Pakistani female has more than six.

Several country-specific reasons that do not apply everywhere have further discouraged education of girls in Pakistan. Unlike sons, daughters are widely regarded as merely “on loan” to parents until marriage, so spending money on their schooling seems frivolous. And along with the economic pressures Singh mentioned and that are present in all poor countries, middle-class Muslim mores have further militated against educating girls.

“The family looked upon a woman’s income as an insult, so she did not need school,” said Yasmeen Ehsan, a Pakistani who is program officer for UNICEF in Islamabad, the capital. “There was also a sense of overprotecting a girl, that she was only safe if kept inside the four walls of her house.”

The Islamic religion is far from being anti-education; the Prophet Mohammed himself said a person should be ready to go all the way to China to seek knowledge. But hostility seems to come from rural clerics, often semiliterate or illiterate themselves, who view Western-style education as a threat to their authority. Educating girls seems particularly objectionable.

In another predominantly Muslim country, Bangladesh, 55 schools have been burned down for admitting girls and a total of 1,400 have been vandalized over the last four months, foreign non-governmental organizations report. The local press said Muslim mullahs beat a man with shoes and shaved his head for teaching illiterate women in a village 120 miles northeast of Dhaka. In January, a woman educator was flogged.

Here in Pakistan, there had been a very different vision, for both boys and girls. Three months after Pakistan was born in the bloody agony of India’s Partition, a national conference on education determined that schooling in the new Islamic state would be compulsory and free for all. That was 47 years ago. How has the country performed?

“At 30% literacy, two thirds of the population is in the dark,” wrote Shaheen Attiqur Rehman, director of the Community Literacy Promotion Program in Punjab province.

Eighteen million Pakistanis ages 5 to 9 of both sexes should be enrolled in the five grades of primary school, but only 12.4 million were registered by their parents. By grade four, 48% will have dropped out--because of family pressure to work, fear of beatings from the teacher or lack of instruction or textbooks.

The low enrollment and retention figures are much worse for girls. In Pakistan’s most remote rural areas, such as Baluchistan, North-West Frontier Province and parts of Punjab and Sind, 8% to 10% of girls attend class.

‘Ghost’ Schools

Even the existence of schools does not mean education is necessarily taking place. One Pakistani study found that in the 300-square-mile valley where Chhoi sits, 60% of the government primary schools were closed because too few graduates of the Primary Teacher Course were willing to move to such a backward area.

Of the 125,000 primary schools in Pakistan, 29,000 are “ghost” schools, without buildings, and classes must be held under the trees or in the open, the study said.

There are 38,000 schools in mosques, with one teacher and one room each, the enrollment about equally divided between boys and girls. Educators’ opinions differ about the quality and modernity of their curriculum.

One journalist who recently visited Abban Chaki, 20 miles outside Islamabad, found two government primary schools.

The boys school was housed in a three-room building in such dangerous condition that classes had to be held in a tree-shaded courtyard. The girls’ school had no building at all. Only poor children attend these schools; the well-to-do are catered to by an elite “government model school” or private institutions.

Some find the sorry state of public education no accident.

“Government in this region has always been in the hands of the few; it’s like it’s their birthright,” UNICEF’s Ehsan said. “They could only keep this situation if they didn’t educate the masses.”

It often seems there are two realities: the leadership’s professed ambitions and its lackluster performance.

During the just-concluded seventh Five-Year Plan, for instance, the government spent only half of the $233 million allocated to primary education, official reports show.

It is too early to tell whether Bhutto’s leadership will break this mold.

A UNESCO study recommends that Asian countries allocate 3.1% of their gross domestic product to education. In last five years, Pakistan averaged 2.1%. Specialists on education say Bhutto, pleading inadequate revenue, has made it clear she does not intend to boost expenditures.

So a dollop of skepticism is in order when an official such as Munir Ahmad, an adviser in the Ministry of Education, reels off the government’s plans. A 10-year “national education policy” is supposed to close the gender gap by the year 2002, by increasing girls’ school enrollment by an average of 8.8% per year.

Fifty-five thousand new schools are to be built for 5.5 million new pupils, 60% of whom are supposed to be girls. More than $1 billion is supposed to be expended on improving teachers, facilities and instruction materials for the first five grades. More and more, schools will cater to both boys and girls.

Some educators doubt that these grandiose schemes will ever come about.

It is all reminiscent of a law just adopted by the Punjabi legislature declaring education compulsory for children ages 5 through 10. It was at least the third time such a law was voted, and nothing much has changed. As a matter of fact, Pakistan’s constitution obligates the state to provide free education to all up to secondary level, but less than a third of the children are attending.

Syllabus for Change

In the last few years, incentives have been dreamed up to attract more girls to class, such as free textbooks and small stipends. In Baluchistan, North-West Frontier and parts of Sind, girls from the poorest families are given a small amount of rice, wheat flour and cooking oil if they come to school. It’s a bribe.

“The parents should have a good incentive to send their daughters, since they get food back,” said Ahmad, the education ministry adviser.

The international donors who are helping to underwrite Pakistan’s economy insist that more be done to educate girls and women, and people such as UNICEF’s Ehsan believe that such pressure will be the most potent catalyst for change. Accompanying foreign pledges of about $1 billion in aid to education should fund many improvements.

Private organizations in Pakistan have also moved to supplement the sadly inadequate actions of government. In the face of their failures, stalwarts in the state educational Establishment such as Ahmad now welcome people once regarded as meddlesome interlopers and hope that they will bear 50% of the costs of education.

At the grass-roots, there is a multitude of innovative, exciting alternative education schemes under way.

In the sprawling slums of the port city of Karachi, “home schools” in private apartments dispense learning to slum children for two or three hours each day.

Capitalizing on the prestige that accrues to any Muslim who can read the Koran, the Pakistani government has said it will experiment in 200 centers to see if the holy scriptures written in Arabic can be used to teach women secular Urdu, since the alphabets are similar.

A Success Story

One area of success is the Chakrala Valley, where Chhoi lies amid dusty fields that receive only four or five inches of rain a year.

Female literacy in this hamlet of squat, one-story adobe dwellings had been less than 1%. Then, in September, 1991, the girls’ school opened.

For four hours a day, outdoors or in the simple unlit building erected by the villagers, the girls now learn basic subjects such as Urdu, arithmetic and writing. Like Koran scholars, they softly read aloud by rocking back and forth to mark the rhythm of the words.

Brightly colored wall posters show how a tree grows, why the moon has phases, the shrines of Islam. A plastic pouch is filled with pamphlet-format books the girls can take home on their honor.

It is all wonderfully eye-opening for girls who, before the school’s creation, were made to spend much of their day toiling in the fields, hauling water or tending to siblings.

Noor, the teacher, personifies the possibility of ending the gender gap. Until her father moved to Karachi 15 years ago, she said, she couldn’t read. Her equally illiterate mother saw nothing wrong with feeding her with filthy baby bottles.

Now for three dozen girls and a few boys who tag along, Noor incarnates the excitement of learning and the horizons that open when a child takes up a book. Perhaps as important, she is the only female authority figure most girls here have seen.

“When I am old, I am looking forward to these girls telling me, ‘We learned from you,’ ” Noor said. The teacher and school may not change the hard facts of life in Chhoi. But Shazia Bibi and her classmates have seen something else they can do with their lives.

What would they like to be when they grow up? a recent visitor to the Chhoi school asked.

“A teacher,” one 11-year-old girl replied. “A teacher,” Shazia agreed. “A teacher,” a third girl echoed.

Education Gender Gap (by region) Average number of years of schooling:

Developed countries:

Male: 9.9

Female: 9.6

Latin America: Male: 5.6

Female: 5.3

East Asia: Male: 6.2

Female: 4.3

Middle East--North Africa: Male: 4.5

Female: 2.4

South Asia: Male: 4.1

Female: 2.0

Sub-Saharan Africa: Male: 1.9

Female: 0.9

Source: Population Action International

Report Card on Countries France gets an “A” and Chad an “F” for educating girls, according to the “Female Education Index.” The index blends five factors, including years of schooling and enrollment for girls and for girls versus boys. *

Top 10

France: 99.7

Canada: 99.4

Finland: 98.3

Norway: 98.2

Belgium: 97.8

United States: 97.7

Netherlands: 97.4

Sweden: 97.1

Denmark: 96.2

Britain: 96.1

Bottom 10