The Pakistan Education Development (PED) Program was supported by USAID starting in 1990 and ending in 1994. The aim of the PED Program was to increase the enrollment of children, especially girls, and improve the quality of the primary school program in the two low-literacy provinces of Pakistan (Northwest Frontier Province and Balochistan). The materials collected here are ones developed for NWFP.
From 1987 (when The Harvard BRIDGES Project conducted preliminary studies) to 1994 USAID funded one of the biggest international development projects on primary education it had ever attempted. The PED Program was a $280 million 10 year project conducted in two low literacy provinces in Pakistan of Baluchistan and Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP). Many criticized this project as “accomplishing little” and in fact little survived after it ended. But this was not because project activities were ineffective or failed to produce the results asked for in the project design. It was because the US Government invoked the Pressler Amendment that prematurely in the case of Pakistan cut off aid to countries with nuclear weapons. The program addressed the primary education sector comprehensively with school construction, improved textbooks, training, better planning tools and institutional restructuring. It abruptly came to a halt in 1994 after only four rather than the planned 10 years for the activity.
Less than a decade later from 1998 to 2002 UNICEF and Save the Children planned and implemented a project to develop textbooks for Afghan children based on the Pakistan model described above. The initiative was in response to the hiatus in primary education assistance after the Taliban banned girls and female teachers from government schools.
The text books were written by more than 70 Afghan educators under the supervision of an international curriculum expert and were completed in the fall of 2001. In January of 2002, they were printed in quantities sufficient for the 1.3 million children expected to enroll in the first semester after the US take-over of Afghanistan. However at the last minute the US Government convinced the Afghan Interim Minister of Education to reverse his decision and use US-supported books developed by the University of Nebraska in the 1980s. This decision effectively halted the use of the UNICEF supported books, and replaced them with a set of pedagogically inferior books that were used until new books could be developed in the Ministry of Education in Kabul. The website contains the competencies (standards) for the primary grades and the draft textbooks for Afghan children.
In addition, the website contains information on an education-driven project implemented in Egyptian villages funded by USAID. The New Horizons Project was implemented in partnership with the Centre for Development and Population Activities (CEDPA) and a handful of Christian and Muslim NGOs in Egypt. This is a life skills-focused project conducted during late 1990s for out-of-school girls.
List of Project Materials
This color-coded excel spreadsheet contains the names of all documents for the Afghan, Pakistan, and Egypt projects, including supplemental materials. The website database consists of 74 documents. This is an assortment of materials in different languages. The five languages used are Arabic, Dari, English, Pashto, and Urdu. To access all the documents with their descriptions, click on appropriate tabs under Projects.
Primary Education Support 