When he was growing up in a village in south Punjab, Arif Naveed was surrounded by a family who believed in the importance of education. He excelled, but as he got older he started to question why he had done so well while other bright students in his school had dropped out of the education system.
What had happened? This question has shaped his career as an education researcher and his desire to reform the education system to make it truly transformative for the poorest in society.
Through his PhD at Cambridge, which he begins this month, he plans to go back to basics and test the assumption that education is the best way out of poverty. “I want to test what education does for the poor, if it improves people’s lives and what changes it brings to social structures and power relations at the community and household level,” he says.
Arif’s childhood experiences of education in a poor rural part of Pakistan have been crucial in shaping his research. Born in a small remote village in south Punjab, he is the third youngest of eight children. His parents - and older siblings - played a key role in encouraging his interest in education. His mother never attended school as there were no schools for girls in most of rural Pakistan then, and as a consequence was keen to encourage her children in their studies. His father was head teacher of the local primary school which consisted of just three rooms and three teachers covering six grades. “He was a great role model for us and for the village,” says Arif. “He was well respected in the community and would knock on parents’ doors to ensure their children didn’t miss school. He created an awareness of the importance of schooling in every household.”
Arif has been working on issues relating to education and development for several years since finishing an undergraduate and masters programme in economics. However, after some time working in development, he soon felt that the problems the poor faced in Pakistan were as much cultural and social as economic. In 2006, he transferred to the University of Bath for an interdisciplinary masters in international development with the aid of a Commonwealth Scholarship. Returning to Pakistan, he joined the leading think tank, the Mahbub-ul-Haq Human Development Centre.
He soon started work on a DFID funded, University of Cambridge project led by Professor Christopher Colclough. Arif was the lead researcher for Pakistan and spent two years assessing how education affected the social and human development of poor communities. He oversaw the collection and analysis of data, training field researchers to find out what the poor get out of their schooling, how they acquire skills, how education enhances their life chances and whether such outcomes could be improved through better schooling.
Since then he has been mining the rich data collected by the programme and working with policymakers. He was invited to contribute to the Ninth Five-Year Plan of Pakistan on education, employment and income distribution. He started work on a new model of multidimensional poverty since the government’s definition of poverty focused mainly on household income/consumption levels. “Focusing only on income/consumption does not give a full picture of poverty or wellbeing; the poor lack access to health services, may be illiterate, die younger and have poorer nutrition,” he says, “I made the case for taking into account the coincidence of multiple deprivations poor people face.”
In 2010, Arif joined another think-tank, the Sustainable Development Policy Institute where he researched curriculum content and religious diversity. In 2012 he was asked by the UK’s Department for International Development to help design Punjab’s education reform programme for 2013-18. The programme aims to enroll 2.9m new students in Punjab, 71% of whom will be girls, and to increase primary participation from 78% to 90% of children. It will build more than 15,000 new classrooms, prioritising the poor districts and communities and benefitting girls more.
In 2012, Arif co-authored his first book which highlighted the stark regional disparities in the incidence of multidimensional poverty in Pakistan resulting from the lopsided development practices of the past. This work deepens the poverty debate in Pakistan, making the case for affirmative action to uplift deprived regions. The Planning Commission in Pakistan recently decided to adopt the model while taking into account regional differences. Arif is currently writing his second book which builds on this framework in collaboration with the Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund, which intends to use his approach in future poverty reduction strategies.
One of his latest projects has been a study of the dynamics of the political economy of policy research in Pakistan. His recently completed report highlights the pitfalls associated with the financial dependence of think tanks on international aid agencies, which leads to international development agendas taking precedence over local priorities, and the lack of university engagement with policy processes. The study argues for research funding regimes which respect think tanks’ autonomy over their research agendas and a greater interaction between think tanks and universities to improve the effectiveness of policy research produced in the country.
Arif arrives back in Cambridge, this time on a Gates Cambridge scholarship, having completed an MPhil in Educational Research in 2013 under Professor Madeleine Arnot’s supervision. They recently published their joint research on youth, gender and citizenship in the Punjab, showing how the rural landscape is changing. As schooling takes hold, it acts as a new social differentiator in the rural field and the growing gap between the educated and uneducated is reshaping gender relations and vice versa. For his PhD, which is jointly supervised by Professor Arnot and Professor Anna Vignoles, Arif will extend this family-focused research longitudinally and integrate it with improved econometric modelling to assess whether education can disrupt the intergenerational transmission of poverty. He says: “I want to reconceptualise schooling so that it is genuinely transformative for the poor and helps them realise their true potential.”
Arif Naveed is a Gates Cambridge Scholar who has already had a major impact on education policy in his home country, Pakistan. At Cambridge he will go back to basics and question the assumption that education is the best way out of poverty.
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