Unpaid teachers and political interference jeopardise education for 40,000 children
PESHAWAR:
Education programmes launched to boost literacy and expand schooling in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa’s merged districts are grappling with severe administrative and financial crises, sources say, disrupting learning in remote tribal areas.
Projects under the former FATA framework, literacy for All (LFA), Basic Education Community Schools (BECS) and the National Commission for Human Development (NCHD), are managed by the Merged Areas Education Foundation (MAEF). Their core aim is to raise literacy rates and offer schooling to children in regions long scarred by terrorism. Despite formal approvals, four sanctioned schemes have been dropped from the annual work plan. Fresh admissions under the scholarship programme have also been frozen.
Sources said the foundation delivered solid results over nearly two decades. Performance has declined sharply in the past 14 months. Implementation of the four approved projects, designed to bring out-of-school children back into the education system, has been halted.
Many officers now occupying senior and mid-level posts at the foundation were appointed on political grounds rather than merit, the sources alleged. Several of them are teachers who left their original classroom duties in other K-P departments. This influx of politically connected staff has weakened day-to-day management and decision-making.
Approximately 420 community schools run by the foundation currently enrol close to 40,000 boys and girls. Their future hangs in the balance. Teachers have not received salaries for the past 24 months. The PC-1 of the Literacy for All project expired on 30 June 2025, while those of BECS and NCHD are due to end on 30 June 2026. Without fresh funding and administrative clarity, the closure of these schools, and the abrupt end of education for tens of thousands of students, has become a real possibility.
Noor Nawaz, a teacher at one of the community schools, said he and roughly 200 colleagues have worked without pay for two and a half years yet continue to report for duty every day. “After the imposition of Governor’s rule and the emergency in the 12 districts, the uncertainty has only grown,” he said. “We do not know when or how our pending salaries will be released.”
Repeated attempts to obtain a response from the Managing Director of the Merged Areas Education Foundation went unanswered.
Teachers, both men and women, and other sources have called on the Governor, who also chairs the foundation’s Board of Directors, and the Additional Chief Secretary of the Area Development Secretariat to intervene immediately. They demand the restoration of the institution’s operational capacity, an end to mismanagement, and decisive action against alleged political interference so that the education of the next generation in the merged districts is not sacrificed.
