All posts by asifsaeedmemon

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About asifsaeedmemon

Development Consultant. I have worked in education, monitoring and evaluation, data and advocacy and gender.

On the effectiveness of foreign aid for education

Development, Education, Pakistan

July 6, 2015: I was quoted in a column on the lack of effectiveness of American aid for education in Pakistan by Nadia Naviwala. The quote is below:

“All aid funding for Pakistan continues to face one problem — it can’t circumvent the politics around education,” says Asif Saeed Memon, a doctoral candidate and research fellow at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI). “For politicians, education is about patronage in two ways. One is teaching positions and the second is school construction, which is about awarding work to their favourite contractors.”

Opinion: 4 percent challenge

Development, Economy, Education, Pakistan, policy

June 4, 2015: This column was published in Dawn’s opinion pages prior to the PML-N ministry’s third federal budget being announced.

The budget season is here. Like every year we’ll be hearing calls to increase the education budget. By now we all know that the Pakistani state — the federation as well as the provinces — spends a paltry 2pc of GDP on education.

By comparison, Bhutan spends over 5pc of its GDP on education and India 3.8pc. Countries in the West spend over 5pc while Scandinavian countries, often ranked at the top of international literacy and numeracy tables, spend in excess of 6pc.

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Research: Alif Ailaan District Education Rankings 2015

Uncategorized

May 7, 2015: The SDPI and Alif Ailaan teams launched the 3rd Alif Ailaan District Education Rankings for Pakistan in Islamabad. This was the third consecutive year of the publication of the rankings. A brief abstract is below.

The rankings attempt to assess both educational outcomes and school infrastructure by comparing the relative performance of different regions.  The rankings provides a comprehensive measure of education standards in Pakistan, covering important policy areas such as access, quality, gender parity and infrastructure.

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Research: Organizational capacity building in Southern think tanks

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Feb, 2015: As part of its participation in IDRC’s Think Tank Initiative SDPI was part of a group of five Southern think tanks, that prepared self-reported case studies on using an action research approach to identify how the organizations had changed their own capacity over the previous 5-6 years.

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Presentation: Launch of the Pakistan Data Portal at SDC 2014

Data, Education, Pakistan, ,

December, 2014: At the 17th annual Sustainable Development Conference’s closing plenary I launched the Pakistan Data Portal. My team at SDPI had been working with our donors Alif Ailaan (DfID funded) on the data portal (a repository of education data in Pakistan) for the better part of the preceding year.

The PDP brought together government collected as well as privately collected data on education in Pakistan and collated them on the same platform for the first time.

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Research: School facilities and educational outcomes

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UNDP-DevAdvo-Graph

May 2014: As a follow up to the launch of the 2nd Alif Ailaan Pakistan district education rankings, Saman Naz (a colleague from Alif Ailaan) and I went back to the rankings data and tested the hypothesis that improved school infrastructure (based on the infrastructure score from the rankings) could be associated with improved educational outcomes (based on the education score).

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