Status: Completed
Start Date: Aug 2016
End Date: Mar 2019 Geographic Coverage: 8 Districts in Balochistan Focus Area: Education SDG Goal: 4 To ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all Implementing Partner: Strengthening Participatory Organization (SPO) Funding Partner: Government of Balochistan
SPO and the Government of Balochistan is committed to address the multiple challenges in the education sector to meet its obligation to achieve Education for All under Article 25-A of the Constitution of Pakistan. Education for every child is also one of the major Sustainable Development Goals. In order to ensure the provision of education to both girls and boys, the Government of Balochistan prepared a five-year Balochistan Education Sector Plan (BESP). GPE-BEP was a three-year project financed by Global Partnership for Education (GPE) and supervised by the World Bank. The programme ensured to implement SDG Goal 4 which calls for inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.
The Objectives of BEP project was:
• To increasing school enrollment and retention in the project-supported schools with a special focus on girls’ participation.
• To develop a mechanism to improve the quality of school management in targeted districts of Balochistan.
SPO was an implementing partner of Global Partnership for the Education Project (GPE) working on Balochistan Education Project (BEP) in following eight districts of Balochistan:
Due to SPO’s extensive outreach network at district level, SPO successfully implemented the project. The lists of 133 new sites for upgradation of schools were provided by GPE from which SPO verified 68 sites to upgrade the schools and developed School Improvement Plans. Project teams of SPO also conducted numerous visits in 08 districts in both regions to identify the abandoned buildings, provided data sheets to GPE for their approval to utilize the 65 identified abandoned buildings. Moreover, during the reporting period, SPO project teams formed 246 Parents- Teachers School Management Committees (PTSMCs) after rigorous visits to the respective communities.
The impact of the programme was a milestone in itself. Under this programme, SPO established 171 primary schools for girls and boys and successfully enrolled 7,500 children, out of which 5,500 out-of-school girls were enrolled in 98 schools. It is important to mention that the majority of the schools were established in some of the remotest areas of Balochistan such as Musa Khel, Barkan, Qilla Abdullah and Pishin.
