Malnutrition crisis
FOR several years, now, the alarm bells have been ringing but have largely been ignored by policymaking circles. It has been four years since a survey conducted by Unicef and the Sindh government likened the levels of malnutrition in northern Sindh to those prevailing in sub-Saharan Africa. While this was due in part to the devastating floods that had occurred a few months earlier, in March 2011 the World Bank found that as a result of inflation the country’s poorest families were spending 70pc or more of their total income on food alone. Years later, the situation has not improved. Indeed, it has grown to such disturbing proportions that it is no longer possible for the authorities to ignore it.
Last week, during an inter-provincial meeting in Islamabad chaired by the health minister, Saira Afzal Tarar, the director nutrition, Dr Baseer Khan Achakzai, pointed out that nutrition indicators had deteriorated over the past decade; according to him, 43.7pc children below the age of five in the country are stunted, 15.1pc wasted, and 31.5 underweight because of the lack of proper nutrition. At the meeting, it was decided that the way forward lies in fortifying food, particularly wheat. In fact, the meeting was told that this staple provides the most calories for Pakistanis, but that 60pc to 80pc of its nutrients are lost during the milling process. Fortification, then, is one answer and the state needs to embark on the project with speed. However, other means of addressing the crisis must also be put into operation. Most obviously, it is necessary to initiate a large-scale awareness-raising campaign to give nutrition-related information.
Small studies have from time to time found that poverty alone is not the problem; malnutrition has been found even in households that can afford sufficient food, simply because of people’s lack of awareness about a proper diet and food nutrients. Adding vital vitamins to staples is not enough; the citizenry also needs to be told what vitamins and minerals are, and which foods contain what.
Education report card
THE state of public education in Pakistan has been abysmal for years. But instead of just bemoaning the sorry condition of this critical sector, it is more constructive to spot the many weaknesses of the system and work towards rectifying these inadequacies. And reports such as Alif Ailaan’s District Education Rankings help identify the weak spots. The advocacy group recently launched the 2015 edition of the rankings, examining the state of education in the country’s 148 districts and agencies. This effort is important as it gives a district-wise picture. The overall prognosis is that while some parts of the country are marching on despite obstacles such as weak infrastructure and limited resources, other areas are either stagnant or deteriorating further. Sindh’s performance, for example, has been described as “poor” and the report is critical of the provincial government’s failure to address the situation. Even in Punjab — which tends to lead on many counts — the study says there are “stark” differences between the province’s southern, central and northern districts.
Azad Kashmir, on the other hand, has overtaken Punjab and now stands as the second best-performing region. In fact AJK and Gilgit-Baltistan have been praised for trying to improve their performance despite poor infrastructure. Balochistan’s performance can be described in one word: “abysmal”. On a brighter note, the study praises the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa administration for improving its enrolment, retention and gender parity indicators. The key problems as identified by the report are that learning outcomes in Pakistan are poor and that education quality remains low. In other words, for the most part, our children are not getting a quality education in the public sector even if they make it to school and manage to stay in class. One area that has been highlighted for improvement is the allocation of funds. The country currently spends just around 2pc of GDP on education, whereas the desired figure is at least 3pc. But even the money that is spent is not delivering satisfactory outcomes.
However, as some areas are making an effort to improve themselves — GB, Azad Kashmir and KP, for example — it may prove beneficial to see what sort of practices these governments have adopted to address the education crisis. Clearly, unless the provincial administrations make it their priority to deliver quality education to all children in all districts, there will be slim chance of Pakistan’s education emergency abating anytime soon.
Missing persons
TO his credit, the chief minister of Balochistan, Abdul Malik Baloch, continues to be a leader who speaks relatively candidly on issues few politicians are willing to discuss openly. But when the admission is about total failure on the missing persons’ front, candidness offers cold comfort. Speaking at a book launch in Karachi, the chief minister claimed that his government is still in talks with the so-called angry Baloch – effectively, the soft and hard separatists – but said that there has been no progress on the issue of the missing persons. While the admission will have come as no surprise to political observers, consider the sheer enormity of it. Two years into a government that was elected on the promise of change, seven years into the transition to democracy and over a decade since the fifth Baloch insurgency began and that soon moved away from the traditional tribal centres to one across a swathe of middle-class, non-tribal Baloch areas, the chief minister of the province is effectively admitting that he has no control over a fundamental issue that has for years fuelled the anger of the Baloch.
Dr Baloch also had other dispiriting words: he essentially appealed to the centre to give more information to the people of Balochistan on its plans for Gwadar and presumably the road network that will be needed to make the port in Gwadar a trading hub. But the centre is run by the PML-N that is a partner of the chief minister’s National Party in the Balochistan government. In fact, Dr Baloch became chief minister because Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif preferred that the provincial government be led by the PML-N’s junior partner in terms of seats in the Balochistan Assembly. That Dr Baloch has to turn to the media to try and elicit answers from his coalition partner in Balochistan is perhaps emblematic of how far the NP government has fallen in terms of the promise it held a mere two years ago. In Balochistan, a carve-up of sorts can be seen. The big economic decisions have been ceded to the civilian-run federal government; all the security decisions have been retained by the army-led security establishment.
This has rendered Dr Baloch’s task of reaching out to the disaffected Baloch near impossible. If the chief minister cannot even influence the decision to produce to their families, let alone the judiciary, the disappeared people in the province, what can his standing really be in any negotiations with the separatists? If Chief Minister Baloch does appear to be fast becoming a peripheral figure, a great deal of the blame should fall on the centre. The PML-N government appears to all but have given up on trying to influence the security policy towards a province blighted by a dirty war between separatists and the military.
Published in Dawn, May 11th, 2015
http://www.dawn.com/newspaper/editorial