LAHORE - In Pakistan, many of small as well as big industries require education and training pathways, which stretch from school through to vocational and higher education. These industries are underpinned by advanced research. What are the key skills that will define the economic needs for Pakistan; how are they contributing to economic growth and what role do industry and education system play in the new skills agenda? Can national policies drive forward best practice or should this be a market-driven approach?
Innovation has always been the driving force and inertia behind development in many sectors which have stirred a global change, be it healthcare or technology. However, education, which is the bedrock of all sorts of development, has been left behind as far as innovation is concerned. Realizing this glaring deficit in education sector, World Innovation Summit for Education was established dedicated to provide a platform to all the educational enthusiasts around the world to discuss and put forward diverse ideas to promote innovation in education. It is an international platform for innovation that nurtures new approaches, recognizes and supports successful initiatives and helps these initiatives spread and grow.
This goal of achieving global innovation in education has also been furthered by raking in key players from political arena and at government level in all countries as truth be told: education alone cannot subsist and grow without support from all sectors involved in governance. Given the fact that WISE community is 18,000 members strong in 152 countries who are cumulatively seeking novel solutions to the challenges being faced by education, it would not be an under-statement to say that the world will see the education revolution in a few years to come.
The summit is held annually and each year a theme is prescribed to it which shapes the events and discussions at the summit. In the last year, 2012, the theme was ‘Collaboration for Change’. This year the theme is ‘Reinventing education for life’. The 2013 summit is due to be held on October 29-31 in Doha, Qatar. T
he program will include interactive Plenary Sessions, Debates, and Focus Sessions on innovative best practices or projects, along with Workshops to facilitate cross-sectoral collaboration on specific issues. The speakers are among the leading practitioners, innovators, donors, thinkers and policy makers. Their informative and inspirational presentations, discussions, and interactions with attendees will provide valuable assistance to organization in managing current practices in learning and innovation.
Since its inception in 2009 under the patronage of the Qatar Foundation, WISE Summit has seen participations from developing countries where independent people have taken it to themselves to further education via using an innovation of any sort. However, despite proactive participation from other developing countries, Pakistan has yet to be seen manifesting some grand form of participation. It would be worth mentioning here that recently in Pakistan the education sector has been overtaken actively by private institutions and public sector institutes have become substandard.
Therefore, more preference should be given to national level participation in the Summit to grasp the current changes in education sector along with the increase in poverty, hunger and terrorism.
With generating employment through industrialization, providing education to every citizen is a constitutional responsibility of the government and it is about time that the government exhibited a will to act upon its responsibility.