Pity the people of Pakistan,
trapped between self-serving, complacent elites who preside over a crumbling
state, and a rich array of violent extremists who seem determined to tear the
same state apart. The extremists promote crisis and the state depends on crisis
to persuade people to put vested interests aside, if only for a while. The
military, the country’s most meritocratic and efficient institution, is widely
regarded as the only force that can break this grim cycle. Yet there are other,
largely hidden forces at work in Pakistan that hold it together and offer it a
better future: adaptability and resilience, entrepreneurship and shared coping.
These forces can be found in the very new – widespread mobile banking services –
and the very old – Islam’s traditions of charity, justice and learning. When
government and donors work creatively with these forces, amazing things can
happen., Pakistan has one of the best regulatory environments in the world for
microfinance and one of the fastest growing microfinance sectors, with 3m
borrowers. It is also one of the most innovative places in the world for mobile
banking services, partly due to the State Bank of Pakistan’s moves to encourage
the market.
About 1.5m customers make about 30m transactions a quarter through their
mobiles, using a network of 20,000 agents, mainly local shops, to collect their
cash., A wave of charitable giving by individuals has helped to ensure that the
hundreds of thousands of people displaced by floods in 2010 are not still living
in tents. A guerrilla army of more than 100,000 Lady Health Workers, funded by
government, has helped to reduce markedly the number of women and babies who die
in child birth, according to studies by the World Bank. Too many children are
still out of school and many government schools are woeful. Yet Pakistani
parents go to enormous lengths to give their children, girls and boys, a chance
of an education.
Low-cost private sector schools, charging perhaps $2 a week, are booming in
slums and villages. Wherever girls receive a secondary level education, small
private schools run in the homes of their owners start popping up, as they put
their education to use to improve their standing in society. Even the
government’s conservative figures suggest that a third of children in Pakistan
and half in Karachi, many of them from poor households, attend such schools.,
The Citizens Foundation, funded entirely by small, anonymous donations, has
created almost 900 high-quality schools catering for girls and boys from poorer
backgrounds, taught by women teachers trained by the charity.
Indeed, Pakistan has a record in picking up new approaches to learning. The
Allama Iqbal university in Islamabad, the first open university outside the UK,
is the second largest in the world with 1.8m students. Start-ups such as Tele
Taleem, tucked away on a dusty industrial estate on the outskirts of Islamabad,
are pioneering ways to take learning to schools in the remoter regions, through
satellite links and cheap tablet computers. Donors are playing a vital role in
promoting social innovation.
The UK’s Department for International Development has pioneered a new road map
for school improvement in Punjab, which Sir Michael Barber, the education reform
expert, says is delivering one of the world’s fastest improvements in school
performance. In Karachi, tens of thousands of poorer families will next year
receive vouchers to send their children to low-cost private schools. In
agriculture, social venture capitalists such as Indus Basin Holdings are leading
efforts to link groups of small-scale rice farmers to multinational companies.
Pakistan’s institutions may seem frozen, its elites worried that taking on the
extremists will provoke even more violence in the run-up to next year’s
elections. Yet, at the grassroots, Pakistan is in perpetual motion, with
ceaseless creativity as people find affordable solutions to their basic needs.
These largely hidden forces of resilience offer the best hope for the country’s
future. In Pakistan, the state may be fragile but society is far stronger than
many think. The writer is a visiting fellow at the National Endowment for
Science Technology and the Arts.
https://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/986153d4-2804-11e2-afd2-00144feabdc0.html
Time to look again at Pakistani society
By Charles Leadbeater
Financial Times
November 6, 2012