Author: Javaneh Buriro

Late last year, I was honoured to join a group of researchers, teachers, administrators, and activists for education in something called the South-South Fellowship — with technical support from Brazil’s Leman Foundation and Oxford University. The South-South Fellowship connects the education communities from Kenya, Brazil and Pakistan to help generate collaborations and lesson-learning across contexts with greater similarity to each other than what we normally get when donor programmes invest directly in efforts to change the status quo in education. Almost exactly a decade ago, in February 2013, a few colleagues and I had begun working on one such effort…

In 1933, Rahmat Ali, a student at Cambridge University envisioned the birth of Pakistan. Its name was an acronym representing the areas that Ali believed should secede from British India – Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, Sindh, and Baluchistan. The state of Bengal, then home to more Muslims than any other province of the British Raj, was not part of this plan. The omission of Bengal would prove to be symbolic of Pakistan’s political trajectory, but, even without it, the name would constitute not one unified nation but rather a sum of its parts. Today, Pakistan comprises four administrative units (Punjab, Sindh,…

Minister for Finance Ishaq Dar expected to hold consultations with core economic team in couple of days The IMF has shared lists of prerequisite actions and told Pakistani authorities in plain words that Islamabad will have to move towards implementing all demands in the next 15 to 20 days for reviving the stalled Fund programme. Now the time has come for taking “all required actions” by Pakistani authorities and there is a timeframe of two to three weeks for implementing all required actions that could pave the way for striking a staff-level agreement and releasing of $1 billion tranche under the…