Mr. Lila Ram, Senior Manager Research and Advocacy presented an academic paper at a two-day International Conference on Embedding Quality Education for All-District Initiatives across Pakistan held on 5-6 March 2008 at Faisalabad.
Mr. Ram’s paper on “Evidence-Based Policy in Education: Issues and Challenges in Pakistan” reflected on the reasons for the gap between research and policy and highlighted the issues and challenges of this field. In this context, the paper also touched on TRC’s experiences of policy dialogue and public-private partnerships in education. Mr. Ram concluded that the challenges for Evidence-Based Policy in education are related to the lack of realization about the importance of scientific evidence, political agendas and the lack of effective mechanisms to ensure the use of evidence, effective dissemination of research findings and the quality and relevance of evidence.

The conference was organized by the Strategic Policy Unit, City District Government Faisalabad. The objective of the conference was, to provide a platform for sharing experiences and positive practices with respect to quality education and to promote networking opportunities for stakeholders, policy makers and researchers on decentralized initiatives in education. At the conference, speakers shared their views, ideas and experiences under the three main themes of the conference: 1) Whole School Development, 2) Public Private Partnerships and 3) Evidence Based Planning. Educators from Pakistan, South Asia, USA and UK participated in this conference.