Nadia Naviwala: “We can’t spend our way out of the education crises.”
ISLAMABAD: Nadia has come a long way from her all-American childhood and her Ivy league education, a move most Pakistanis would dread, but Nadia isn’t like most Pakistanis. Perhaps it’s her American optimism which makes her a bit different.
“I chose to see Pakistan my own way,” Nadia describes in a lucid account of her life, “I had a fellowship at Harvard that would let me go anywhere in the world but I decided to do my summer internship in Karachi,” a city which she remembered for its chaos and the scarcity of a decent candy bar from the early 1990s. In Karachi, Nadia was surprised, a “wide-eyed Pakistani-American” as she once wrote, to see a bustling cosmopolitan city. She saw a Pakistan more “progressive than Pakistani communities in the United States.”
This wasn’t the beginning of Nadia’s love affair with the country her parents had left in the 1980s. She had spent most of her time as an undergrad at Georgetown working as an intern with the Pakistan’s embassy in D.C. After completing her graduate degree from Harvard, she worked with USAID as their Pakistan Desk Officer in Washington. This love affair with Pakistan would remain a long-distance relationship, for now, perhaps even a one-sided one.
“The public criticism on USAID is based on not seeing the aid, and that’s understandable,” however, she adds that “you won’t see the effects of foreign aid in big cities anyways.” For Nadia, the real frustration, and a more well-founded one are with USAID itself — “there were way too many people involved in the program in Pakistan, it was hard to know how aid was hitting the ground.”
After her stint with the USAID, Nadia decided to pack her bags and move to Islamabad, as the Country Representative for the United States Institute of Peace (USIP). It was a position that made her a guest to Islamabad’s elite parties, but it also made her question the relationship between development and aid.
“Giving people over-priced Samosas and chai in Marriott doesn’t bring development,” she said to herself as she left USIP and settled down in Islamabad as a resident. (She notes that USIP did not fund events at hotels during her tenure.) She went on to write for a Pakistani newspaper and then joined The Citizens Foundation in 2015 as an advisor, and in 2016 became a Public Policy Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center, where she authored research on Pakistan’s education sector.
Nadia has plenty of insight into Pakistan’s education sector. For one she claims that “the education crises is not a money problem,” it’s a “political problem.” That’s a fact she has pointed to in several forums both in Pakistan and abroad. “The narrative has been that doubling the education budget will solve it,” however “in 2016 Pakistani provinces spend between 17 to 28% of their budgets on education, while the global average is 14%.” Despite budget increases, the enrolment rates have stagnated nationally. That, for her, is a reflection of a much deeper problem.
“We have to gotten to a point where we can get a teacher to show up in school,” but the ultimate tragedy for Nadia is what these students are learning in school, “over half of 3rd graders are illiterate,” she adds. In one such example, she points towards a public school teacher in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa who has a masters degree and had gone through an expensive training program to teach literacy but all of her students failed to identify the first letter of Pakistan in any language. “This is where the failure is.”
The irony is that private schools, on average, spend half of what the public school spends, but their students are usually two grades ahead; “it’s about whether school and teachers are accountable to parents, and in public schools, they are not.” Looking forward, for Nadia, “what you need is a trifecta: a sincere education minister with political backing from the head of his party and an education secretary who is a strong bureaucratic leader,” adding “Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is seen as more successful than Punjab thanks to this recipe.”
At 33, Nadia isn’t looking back to her birth country, at-least for now. “I’m not going to settle for a place or a job for practical reasons.”
This is part of our #BeyondClassrooms series, you can view it here.
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