Abstract

Pakistan like other developing countries is facing many problems that include: population explosion, lack of basic necessities of life, housing, medical care, mass scale, illiteracy, low productivity and poor standard of living. The major cause of all these problems is low literacy in the country. Pakistan, during the last five decades has made tremendous efforts to improve the literacy rate but adult literacy rates remained low. Literacy efforts have so far failed to achieve the set targets. This study has been designed to explore the shortcomings at planning and implementation stages of literacy improvement efforts executed by the government of Pakistan. Data was collected from 50 Educationists i.e. Ph.D. degree holders in Education, 50 Policy makers i.e. working in the top level management in policy formation and programme development, 35 Implementers i.e. Provincial Secretary, Additional Secretary, Deputy Secretary etc. 70 Executive District Officers (education and literacy) and 400 Literacy teachers through a questionnaire that was developed at five point rating scale ranging from ‘1’ indicating strongly disagree to ‘5’ indicating strongly agree. Snowball sampling technique was used to find the most relevant respondents for different literacy improvement programmes in different areas of the country. Overall 1200 questionnaires were sent to the respondents but 998 questionnaires were got back. The overall response rate was 83% that was encouraging. Main findings of the study revealed that planning of the literacy improvement programmes was not made properly; effective linkage was not developed among various levels of the literacy improvement programmes and proper coordination was not made at national, provincial and local level.