Coronavirus has rammed home the extent of Pakistan’s digital divide. Could it lead to a useful debate about the future of technology in education?
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Five days a week, 12-year-old Khairunnisa Hussain logs into a 0900 Zoom conference with her classmates and head teacher, and then for the next four hours works quietly by herself on downloadable maths, science and French worksheets. Last month, an art assignment required replicating images of Damien Hirst’s butterfly paintings sent via email. On Tuesdays, the PE teacher shares links of yoga videos for the students to practice.
In Pakistan, where over 300,000 schools have been closed since March due to the coronavirus outbreak, the students at Hussain’s private school in Lahore are the lucky ones, able to continue learning through digital platforms and applications. But for millions of other Pakistani students, the fundamentals of connected life – smartphones and the internet – remain out of reach.
Atiq Ali, an economics student at Karachi’s Institute of Business Administration, returned to his hometown of Turbat, where there’s no wireless internet or 3G/4G coverage, after his university shut down. Now, every morning, he rides his motorcycle an hour out of town, braving temperatures up to 50 degrees Celsius, to download lectures at a friend’s house. “It’s just a lot of effort to get there,” Ali says in a phone interview. “And then sometimes there is no power, sometimes the internet goes down.”
While access to education was already a problem in Pakistan – 22.8 million of Pakistan’s over 70 million children are out of school – the coronavirus outbreak has exposed its profound technological inequities. Over 50 million school and university-going Pakistanis now risk falling behind, says Umbreen Arif, a top education advisor for Pakistan’s central government.
Last month, hundreds of students across Pakistan protested against the government’s decision that universities hold online classes, even as poor internet services remain a major problem, particularly in remote provinces like Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Gilgit-Baltistan.
Indeed, home broadband is expensive outside Pakistan’s big cities, smartphone penetration stands at 51% this year and only one million school-age children have regular access to digital devices and bandwidth, according to the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority. However, about 40 million Pakistani children have access to a television – which is why the government says it kicked off its coronavirus distance learning strategy with a dedicated TV channel called Teleschool.
Television has a wider reach than digital technology at the moment in Pakistan, figures show
Launched on 13 April just two weeks after schools closed, the channel runs on state-owned PTV Home, which has a subscriber base of over 54 million people, and broadcasts content for grades 1-12, sourced for free from four Pakistani ed-tech companies. A text messaging system with 250,000 subscribers was added in late May so parents and students could engage with dedicated teachers.
“We’re also now working towards starting a radio school so that we can have some remote areas accessed,” Federal Education Minister Shafqat Mahmood told the BBC, adding that an e-learning portal with digital content available on demand and a local area network system to deliver content to the poorest regions were both in the works. A “student relief package” with low-cost internet packages and reduced duties on smartphones had been placed before the prime minister for approval, he added.
Initial funding for Teleschool came from a $5m World Bank grant, advisor Arif says, while a $20m grant has been secured from the Global Partnership for Education, a multilateral funding platform focused on developing nations. Discussions were ongoing with the World Bank for longer-term assistance of $200m to support learning in “districts with inequities”, Arif says.
But for now, the struggle is very real for millions of Pakistan’s children.
Ten kids, one smartphone
Through April, one seventh-grade student at a low-cost private school in a northwestern Pakistani district received her homework on her father’s smartphone. Then her father was called back to work at his out-of-town job and the family’s only internet-enabled device was now 400km away. “I just spend most of my time now working on improving my handwriting,” says the student, whose name is being withheld for security reasons.
Even households with smartphones are facing problems. One middle-aged woman, a former teacher from Lahore, says she has one smartphone and 10 kids to teach in the home where she lives with her extended family. “All the children are in different classes and have to be taught different material,” she says. “Sometimes we can borrow the grandparents’ phones but most of the time they all have to use my phone.”
A 15-year old boy from Gujranwala, north of Lahore, says he uses his older brother’s phone to view educational videos. “But my brother is always on TikTok and he gets really annoyed when I ask for his phone,” he says.
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