Gender and Literacy in Pakistan

dear moja

while being gender-aware may be a redundancy in the personal context, but when organizations and policies are promulgated which do not take into account gender perceptions behaviors and sensitivities, quite apart from calling the policies failures, they also need to be made gender aware until they get it, to ensure any meaningful implementation for beneficiaries, given that planning has been done in a gender and context aware manner.

for ref see work of Iffat Farah and Mehrunnisa ahmed ali
at The aga Khan University - Institute of educational development (aKU-IED), Karachi

http://www.netreed.uio.no/articles/Papers_final/farah.pdf
http://www.aku.edu/ied/raps/ResearchatIED/

The postmodern approach in the above paper, while amusing, is unlikely to prove persuasive in a serious forum. Comments about ``discourse``, ``gender`` as ``knowledge about sexual difference`` strike me as unnecessary new uses and redefinitions of terms that are useful in their ordinary forms, that seems to confuse the author as well (``gender-awareness``? a redundancy). It is more appropriate to talk about budgets, qualified staffing, and adequate text resources, rather than some vague villification of protecions of womens ``reproductive function``.

Also, the tables are unclear. Note in table 1, we have a breakdown of urban female, rural female, summation of all female, then a summation of all male, without an explanation where the male data came from.