International Literacy Day is celebrated today all over the world including Pakistan.
A report by the Sindh Education Department and the Japan International Corporation Agency (JICA) revealed that Pakistan has the lowest literacy rate after Afghanistan.
The report stated that 22 million children in Pakistan are still out of school. In Sindh, the highest number of six million children could not be enrolled in schools. In other provinces too, the situation has worsened rather than improved. In Sindh, 43 percent of ten-year-olds are sitting at home instead of going to school. Forty-five percent of 15-year-olds are out of school.
The report said that 28 percent of children in urban areas of Sindh and 61 percent of children in rural areas are out of school. On the other hand, this year’s World Literacy Day has been attributed to the impact of the coronavirus on the education sector.
According to the United Nations, the coronavirus has severely affected the education and learning process of the new generation and is more harmful to young children. As per the United Nations, Pakistan ranks 113th out of 120 countries in the world in terms of literacy rate. Only 59.13 percent of the country’s population is literate. There are currently 22.8 million out-of-school children in Pakistan.
