Access: A major prohibitive factor in the enrollment of girls in schools tends to be the distance of the school from the house and the availability of female teachers. As an investment, parental attitudes favor males over females in the arena of education and in areas where poor quality of education is a cause for concern as girls are more likely to be withdrawn from school than boys. (Brock et. al,. 1997)

Access to primary schools was rarely an issue of concern for girls and their families as most communities even in the relatively less populous villages did have a 1-2 room primary school. However, with regard to secondary schools, as mentioned before, distance is responsible for creating grave barriers to education. Despite the Government of Sindh’s pledge to expand the capacity of primary schools and upgrade them to include secondary schooling as well, no efforts in this regard were visible in any of the sample schools.

There is a 15% difference between the participation rates – the ratio of enrollment figures with the total population – of girls and boys at the primary level. Overall however, gender disparity in participation rates stands at 10%, a figure which clearly reflects the divergence between the EFA commitments – under which Pakistan had committed itself to end gender disparity at the primary and secondary levels by 2005 – and ground realties.

To reduce the serious mismatch between the numbers of primary schools available for girls and the number of secondary schools, government concentration on provision of more secondary schools would be more in line with the objective of meeting the EFA target for 2015, as opposed to an isolated focus on providing funding for secondary education. Despite such measures however Pakistan, at present, has 4.2 million girls out of a total number of 6.5 million out-of-school children (one of the largest figures for out-of-school children in the world). Pakistan has the second largest number of out-of-school girl children in the world while India stands at number one.