Abstract:
This paper presents descriptive statistics on the government school
education system in Sindh. The data are obtained from the latest administrative
annual school census in Sindh (2011/12). The province’s schooling system comprises
48,932 schools of which 47,000 are primary, middle, and elementary schools, giving
Sindh one of the densest public schooling systems in the world with almost 1.8
schools for every 1,000 people in rural Sindh. The functional schooling capacity,
however, is low, with less than 15 percent of these schools having at least two
teachers and access to basic facilities such as toilets, drinking water, electricity, and
boundary walls. Against this backdrop, we examine key trends in education
outcomes using the Pakistan Living Standards and Measurement surveys for
2004/05 and 2010/11. We find that the net enrollment rates (NERs) at primary,
middle, and secondary level in Sindh stagnated, at best, during 2007–11 after a
sharp increase registered in 2006; this trend is similar to that of the rest of Pakistan.
Gains in NER vary significantly across districts with some performing exceptionally
better than others. Finally, we cross-validate these statistics using independent
household- and school-level census data on 300 communities, collected as part of an
ongoing impact evaluation study in three districts of rural Sindh.
