PESHAWAR: Journalists were urged to incorporate a gender sensitive prospective in reporting of upcoming budget for the fiscal year 2026-27 with the objective of highlighting key challenges hindering promotion of female literacy in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
The issue was raised during a training workshop on Education Budget organized by Blue Veins, a non-governmental organization, in collaboration with Malala Fund.
Titled as `Education Budget Understanding, Analysis, Tracking and Reporting`, the workshop aimed at apprising media persons about their role of making government accountable on education budgeting, observed Yumna Aftab, Project Manager Blue Veins.
“Multiple barriers including structural, social-cultural and economic, impede girl’s access to learning and completing quality education in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, limiting province’s progress towards achieving equitable and inclusive educational outcomes,” she added.
Yumna highlighted that nearly 4.9 million children in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa are not attending school, with girls making up a disproportionate share of around 2.9 million or 60 percent of the aggregate figure.
Among these out of school children maximum are in Peshawar district, more than 500,000 around 519,928 including 200,142 boys and 319,767 girls.
Access to education in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa remains unequal across gender lines driven by numerous challenges.
The gross enrolment ratio for girls at the secondary school level stands at 34.25% compared to 55.78% for boys, indicating that a substantial proportion of school age girls remain out of formal education, she added.
In recent years, Yumna continued, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government has taken significant strides to improve girl’s access to education through policy reforms, targeted programmes and strategic investment including allocating 70 percent of the development budget to girls education.
While these efforts have yielded tangible progress, numerous challenges still persists and girls continue to face barriers to enrolling in school and completing their education.
Muhammad Ejaz Khalil his in presentation on Education Budget shared comprehensive information of allocations and disbursement of funds on literacy.
Ejaz informed that KP government has increased education budget by 11 percent from Rs. 326 billion in 2024-25 to Rs. 363 billion in 2025-26.
However, he said, out of the total budget of Rs. 363 billion only 18 billion is served as developmental while remaining a staggering amount of Rs. 344 billion is spent on salaries and other expenditure of Education department.
The share of Education sector in annual budget of the province is around 17 percent with around 29 new developmental projects for the current fiscal year, he added.
Programme Manager Blue Veins, Qamar Naseem made a presentation on gender responsive reporting and highlighted its importance in bringing to light challenges in increasing literacy rate in the province with focus on female.
Qamar said there are three types of reporting including gender responsive, gender neutral and gender negative.
The journalists should concentrate on gender responsive reporting to ensure equal share of opportunities among boys and girls in getting education, he continued.
Senior Journalist, Lihaz Ali shared tips with his colleagues for reporting on education sector with focus on loopholes in proper disbursement of funds, lack of facilities for girl in learning.
He shared that around five districts in KP including Upper Kohistan, Shangla, Kolai Palas, Dir and Torghar have not a single college for girls, depriving thousands of female students from obtaining higher education.
The role of media is to serve as a watch dog and reporters should contribute investigative stories on implementation of developmental schemes with check on transparency in funds distribution, Lehaz observed.
He suggested them to utilize KP Right to Information (RTI) Act 2013 in obtaining information on different schemes for Education department besides getting information on budgetary figures and funds from websites to make their stories data driven and impactful.
