What important gender in education issues does the activities you are working with address, and why is this work important in Pakistan?
In Pakistan we have co-education for primary level and higher education but single-sex education for secondary education. This means that we need female teachers for girls schools and male teachers for boys schools as well as the necessary infrastructure to have single sex shools at secondary level in the communities. We manage to handle the sitation in regards to infrastructure and male teachers, but we are have a strong shortage of female teachers and are therefore facing a supply problem in regards to secondary education for girls. There are some issues to solve in primary education as well but my main consern at this stage is in regards to the shortage of female secondary school teachers.  

At what stage is the work towards improving gender equality in Pakistan are you working ?
Our work here is still in it's early planning stages and our current short term goal is to establish a gender unit in the Policy and Planning Wing of the MOE.

What challenges and obstacles do you see in your work on gender issues in Pakistan?
The greatest challenge I see is that there is a too low priority on Gender issues in our country. There is a lack of societal understanding towards co-education and there is a lack of knowledge in the MOE, there is for instance no clear understanding among all officials in MOE on the difference between sex and gender. We therefore need to work on raising awarness on gender issues both in the Ministry of Education as well as in other government bodies and society as a whole to tackle the challenge.  

What lessons can be learned from Pakistan in regards to working with gender in education?
It is important to understand that good gender policy can not always be replicated in the same way between different countries and even across different levels of education, namely, between primary, secondary and higher education. A proper adaptation of the policy at the stage of implementation is usually needed to be successful and accepted. In Pakistan, even though we still have challenges in primary education, we have had some success in raising girls enrollment in primary schools through policy work. But due to the different nature of the mode of delivery in primary and secondary education we can not simply translate any successful method used in primary to secondary education. The same is true for policy of different regions and countries, good policy must be developed according to local and specific needs of the target group.