BRIGHT Magazine: I read your story in the New York Times about how Pakistan can’t spend its way out of the education crisis. What are the root causes of the education crisis, and why are they not related to money?

Nadia Naviwala: Pakistan’s education crisis comes down to a crisis of teaching and learning, which is not something that money can solve. You can look at some of the best education systems in the world, and they are not necessarily the ones that spend the most. Efficiency is also really important. You can even look within Pakistan: The provinces and districts that are spending more are not necessarily the ones that have stronger education systems. Pakistan has doubled its education budget since 2010, but we haven’t seen either the improvement in enrollment or the learning value you’d expect.

BRIGHT: Why hasn’t increasing the budget led to better education outcomes?

NN: The majority of the education budget, about 85 percent, goes into teachers’ salaries. If your teachers aren’t showing up to school, or if they aren’t doing anything when they get to school, then it really doesn’t make a difference how much money you’re pouring in.

No one has quite figured out what to do. Once you get teachers to school, how do you improve learning outcomes for kids? This is the reason for high rates of illiteracy in schools in Pakistan.

Two of Pakistan’s four provinces, Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), have achieved a few things regarding education reforms. First, they fixed school infrastructure, because Pakistan was — and still is — a place where going to school is dangerous because the facilities are just so dilapidated. Second was making teachers show up to school. The [provincial] governments started sending someone to school every month to make sure the teacher was there, which resulted in teacher absenteeism plummeting.

So for the next government, their challenge is adherence, and also taking some of these reforms to other provinces, so we don’t send the country into four completely different directions. We know how to make schools look like schools, we know how to get teachers to show up. There is still this problem of illiteracy rates, and the fact that a child can go to school for 3–5 years and still not be able to read a sentence in Urdu or a local language.

BRIGHT: What are the reasons that kids can go to school for so long and still not learn to read?

NN: That’s the heart of the challenge. I don’t know if anybody has an answer, but governments backed by donors have been trying several different things. You can fix the curriculum, you can fix the teacher training. But in the end, it comes down to a teacher being unwilling or unable to teach.

You can force a teacher to show up, but you can’t force her to teach. And that’s what a lot of kids will tell you about what happens in government schools — the teacher might be there, but it’s more like daycare. But the same teachers could teach at a low-cost private school that charges a few dollars a month, and she will teach and she will perform, because there is accountability and she is motivated to do so.

Government teachers are painted as villains, but I don’t think that’s fair. There may be two teachers in the school, and one of them isn’t present. Even if both of them are, they are teaching 3-year-olds and 10-year-olds all at one time. They are given an impossible task. And then there could be a ton of pressure on her to do certain things. For example, she may have a lot of pressure to enroll kids, so she’ll do what is measured against.

Ironically, even though kids aren’t learning much at all, the syllabus is full, and schools are struggling to get through everything in a year. They have 40 minutes per subject, which means teachers don’t have time to focus on anything. Especially if the books are in a language that the kids don’t speak, or that the teachers don’t even speak. This affects a teacher’s motivation. Ultimately, you have to in some way inspire or motivate teachers to perform.

Pakistan has had a lot of policies to force change in education. You can do that when it comes to a teacher’s presence and school infrastructure, but not when it comes to teaching.

BRIGHT: How does gender play into all of this? From what you’re saying, it sounds like most teachers are women. What about girls in school?

NN: There is a huge demand for girls’ education in Pakistan. This is a big myth, that parents in Pakistan don’t want their girls to go to school. I learned this first anecdotally, but if you look at the data, it tells you the same thing. Pew did a survey a few years ago, which found that 86 percent of parents in Pakistan believe that education should be equal for boys and girls, and another 5 percent believe it’s more important for girls than boys. So you’re left with only a small percentage who believe education is more important for boys.

The demand also varies by region. Across the country, Pakistan’s gender gap in school enrollment is about 10 percent. In rural Pakistan, you could have a gender gap of 30 percent, but then you go to the city and the gender gap is only 2 or 3 percent. And in certain areas and age groups, there are even more girls in school than boys.

Education, particularly for girls, is not a demand-side problem. It’s a supply-side problem.

BRIGHT: Do you mean that the problem is less about parents not believing their daughters should be educated and more about there not being schools for girls nearby? Or possibly in some areas, any schools at all?

NN: If schools are within walking distance for girls, staffed by women, and affordable, then girls will come to school. It’s not a lack of demand from parents; it’s more that the systems aren’t always built for them.

I work for a foundation that solved part of the problem of parents not enrolling girls in school. We built schools [sustained on philanthropy] within walking distance for girls, and to make girls feel safer, we hire only women as teachers and principals. In fact, our 12,000 female teachers make us Pakistan’s largest single employer of women in the private sector.

And we got rid of the problem of expense. It’s essentially free for children — or something so affordable, like 10 cents.

BRIGHT: Especially given Imran Khan’s recent election, how does political will play into all of this?

NN: It’s not just the will of a powerful person that will reform an education system that is as big as Pakistan’s. The two parties that led the race in recent elections exhibited political will for education reform while they were in power.

Education is a provincial subject, as are most social sectors. But we don’t know who’s going to be chief minister and education minister in every province yet; those are the people who will be overseeing education reforms.

Each province works differently, and the reforms in each are different because of the management style at the top, as well as the political culture of each province. In KP (the province bordering Afghanistan where Malala is from), it’s a lot more decentralized and lowkey; people I interviewed told me it’s less donor-driven. In Punjab, on the other hand, you have top-down kind of management, and there are huge consequences for failure. Whereas in KP, people openly admit to either failing or struggling.

BRIGHT: Speaking of donors, do you think international donors are talking to Pakistan’s government about what to do in education? Or are they operating separately from each other?

NN: They very much work in tandem. DFID (U.K.’s Department for International Development) and the World Bank work closely with the government. I’m a critic of development aid, but I think the model of education reform in Pakistan has been really good. A model is not going to do everything for you, but at least the approach makes sense.

BRIGHT: Finally, why are you personally so passionate about this subject?

NN: As student of policy, I got very curious about development aid. That’s what led me to Pakistan — I realized as someone who majored in U.S. foreign policy, I didn’t know anything about how development aid was spent. And what I found in Pakistan was very surprising; people started telling me that the government ends up eating the money. I thought there must be a better explanation. I learned that a lot of people are “eating” money but in perfectly legitimate ways, at least as far as donors are concerned.

The reason I got into education was because I saw it as a way to look at how the government spends its own money. But even there, I found donors — albeit ones who did it in a very different way. I found these education programs really fascinating. They are high-priority programs, they do direct budgetary support, and they have very long commitments, like 5–10 years. I’m just very fascinated in the role of external actors in domestic governance reforms.

But also we have to remember that foreign aid is a tiny fraction of the government’s own budget. At times when Pakistan has been the largest or second largest recipient of aid from the US or UK, their contributions in education amount to only 2 percent of the Pakistani government’s budget. Yet people think donors are financing the gap in what Pakistan spends and should be spending.

In the West, we’re obsessed with the funding, because we think that development is a money problem. In reality, that money is tiny, and people in Pakistan don’t understand why the foreign donors expect so much kowtowing. And I think that’s a healthy approach by a government that wants to take ownership of the process.

Development is about how a country uses its own resources. Pakistan has figured out how to fix the easy things — fixing infrastructure, getting teachers in school, and enrolling children. The next government has a tougher challenge ahead: figuring out how to make schools deliver education.