MUZAFFARABAD: Terming education and gender equality key to social welfare and community development, the speakers during a workshop stressed that discriminatory policies supporting gender disparity must be revisited.
They said that a strong community could be built by giving high priority at structural and functional levels to the issue of girls` education and gender equity.
These views were unanimously expressed by the speakers at a consultative-cum-interactive workshop organised and funded by the Unicef in collaboration with Pakistan Girls Education Initiative (PGEI)-United Nations Girls Education Initiative (UNGEI) and National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) here on Thursday.
The workshop was organised with a view to building alliance amongst parliamentarians to ensure gender equity by addressing discriminatory policies and decisions promoting or supporting gender disparity at various levels; lobbying with higher-ups at decision and policy making level to reiterate their commitment towards ending gender disparity in education; orienting the partners about the frameworks that address gender concerns in emergency and inclusion of disaster risk reduction (DRR) as well as disaster management in educational curricula.
Participants included senior AJK government officials, mostly from the education department, representatives of Unicef, UN Women, NDMA, State Disaster Management Agency (SDMA) and some partner NGOs as well as media persons.
AJK Minister for School Education Mian Abdul Waheed, Minister for Rehabilitation Abdul Majid Khan, Deputy Speaker AJK Assembly Shaheen Kausar Dar, MLA Iftikhar Ali Gillani, and NDMA Chairman Dr Zafar Iqbal Qadir also attended different sessions of the day-long workshop.
Speakers from Unicef, AJK Education Department and NDMA shared their experiences and expertise about scouting, introduction of child-friendly schooling and integration of DRR into the curricula.
They said that Pakistan was prone to natural and manmade disasters and analysis of across the global disasters had proved that preparedness of masses against disasters could go a long way in reducing their impact on affected population.
Source: Dawn
Date:11/25/2011
