Higher Education, Science and Technology …. Imperatives for Socio-Economic Development

Good morning. I am greatly honoured to be able to speak to you and to share with you my experiences of developing a policy process in Pakistan that is to some extent evidence-based, but on which a lot more work still needs to be done. I hope I will have the opportunity to interact with you after this lecture and to learn from you.

As you know, there is growing recognition now in developing countries that it is not just physical capital and human capital that is important, but also information, learning and adaptation. We now talk more about a learning economy: an economy that is based on continuous and interactive learning. Globalisation has brought us lots of risks and opportunities. I think you all know about the risks, so I will not go into those in detail. Instead, I will start from our experiences.

In May 2000, we made a presentation to the president of Pakistan and we asked him for an increased budget for science and technology and for education. In the presentation, which was called 'knowledge-based economy', we showed him the population of Belgium, Japan and Singapore and compared the GDP of those countries. We posed the question of why there was a difference between these countries and Pakistan, and suggested that the difference was basically about knowledge. These countries with very small populations were able to enjoy a much higher standard of living and a higher per capita income than Pakistan. Following this presentation, the higher education budget increased by 1200% and President Musharraf gave it his full support and personal interest - so much so that when we asked to see him, it was sometimes us who were not prepared! He was always there for us and would give us a lot of his time, which was very important for us.

This was a real beginning after thirty years of neglect. Since 1970, there has been hardly any funding for science or education in Pakistan. In fact, it was stagnant. There was hardly any research going on and the standards in the universities had deteriorated because the research output was very little. This had resulted in a brain drain and inertia had set into all our institutions. This meant that we really had to start from scratch. The total international publications from all Pakistani institutions averaged only around 500 or 600 and this was simply too little for a population of almost 130 million at that time.

The Higher Education Commission was formed and, again, we gave a separate presentation to them on higher education reforms. We also found a group in Boston with whom we interacted, so the policy direction did not come only from within Pakistan, but we consulted all our universities, we consulted the provinces and we also consulted our expatriate scientists and educationalists. Dr Atta-ur-Rahman, and I went to Boston and gave a presentation to MIT at Boston. We asked their opinion (as well as consulting with our expatriates) and both the IT and the higher education policy then evolved from there.

I am also involved with Nigeria as part of an international advisory group that has been asked to reform Nigerian science and technology. I will show you a slide that I showed to the Nigerian President in May this year, which resulted in a $5 billion allocation for science and technology. I also showed this slide to the President of Pakistan. I think it is this particular slide that really made the difference. In the 1960s, Pakistan and Korea had almost the same GNP per capita, but look what happens after this. During that decade, there is the establishment of the Korean Institute for Science and Technology (KIST), the Korean Advanced Institute for Science and Technology (KAIST), and the launching of the National Research and Development Program (NRDP). Of course other things matter, including political stability, economic stability, commitment and other factors, but these three factors made a huge difference in Korea. The Korean Institute for Science and Technology was helped by the Battelle Memorial Institute and it was restructured so that it would be self-financing. It then spun off into several smaller institutes that were closely integrated with the industrial world and the Koreans managed to get all their expatriate scientists back by offering them lucrative jobs and higher pay scales. One of the Korean documents said that they were treated like kings. I am also telling our government to treat them like kings.

We are learning lessons from China. I have been to China six times over the last three years and have been learning lessons from them. China is our neighbour and we have a lot of trade with them. I think Pakistan has a great opportunity to work with China because when you trade with a country there is demand for technology and when there is demand, people will invest in science and technology.

To give a bit of background, China opened up to global knowledge in 1978 and it carried out a reform of universities and research and development organisations. I met Madame Zhu Lilan who was the brain behind all this. Zhu Lilan now holds three portfolios: she is the Minister for Science and Technology, the Minister for Education and the Minister for Population and Development, and she told me that her scientists were making more money than her. This is because during the reforms, universities were asked to adopt an entrepreneurial character and introduce entrepreneurship courses. Several new technologies were spun off from the universities and the scientists became entrepreneurs. For the scientists, it was a question of reform or perish. There was a large number of institutions, many of which did not reform and as a result closed down. The government is now concentrating on three universities, one of which is in Shanghai. These have many alliances with global universities and are spinning off high-tech companies.

The other policy used in China is the creation of export zones. China has lots of export zones in the peripheral areas that are given lots of incentives for foreign direct investment to attract high-tech companies. China is increasing its domestic research and development (R&D) and its R&D expenditure has gone up significantly, from 0.6% three years ago to over 1.2% now. The productive sector now has a share of about 70% of R&D, so there has been a very fast transition from the public to the private sector. China, as we all know, has become a global player.

We are also learning from our past policies. I have been involved in Pakistan's science policy for a very long time, although always for short periods at a time. Every time I was back home, I would meet the scientists and the industrialists, so I knew some of the problems. Nonetheless, before we developed our policy, we went back to all the documents and reports and anything that was available. We put them all together and we then had meetings. For two years we were implementing things but at the same time I was holding regular meetings with the industrialists, the economists and our scientists. I headed the Oxfam Council for Science and Technology and also the National Commission for Science and Technology, which is the decision-making body. It is headed by the President but I was his secretary on science and technology.

One exercise that we did involved looking at the publications of all the scientists and heads of institutions in Pakistan and writing books about them. We evaluated and benchmarked the institutions and also benchmarked ourselves. We wanted to know about our strengths and our weaknesses and any missing links, and those reports and studies really helped.

As I told you, we consulted widely with the private sector, scientists, government officials and economists and a strategy and action plan has been developed. For this we worked on identifying gaps in three areas: the skills gap, the technology gap and the policy gap. We identified all three and the plan that we made has been adopted by the planning division in Pakistan and is beginning to be implemented now. Our planning was mostly being done by economists, so I spoke to the Prime Minister and I managed to get a group of scientists and engineers into the planning division, who now work as a think-tank and who are asked to review all the projects so that we get integrated planning for our development projects.

Our major programme centred on these five areas: human resource development, infrastructure for research and development, technology development, industrial and information technology. So far, three areas have been given priority by our government. In 2001 it was information technology, then it was biotechnology and the third was engineering. A new Ministry for Information Technology was established and information technology was provided with a large amount of funding and it spread very fast. Dr Atta-ur-Rahman and I worked together and he developed a policy for it.

The restructuring of R&D institutions is still going on. People do not want to change and it has been a very slow process. It has been a big challenge for us. I also managed to strengthen policy coordination to some extent, and management too. For higher education, the government's priorities are mainly infrastructure now. Small and medium industries' development and promotion of the construction industry are also priorities because they can take up very low-skilled people and poor people, so that we are not working only with high-level manpower but also with poorly educated or non-educated manpower in order to provide them with jobs. We have clear linkages here between higher education, technology development and industry.

We have a foreign scholarship scheme where our approach focused on access, quality and relevance. How do you increase access? We have far more universities now. We had 24 universities in the year 2000 and we have around 108 now, but that is not pleasing me at all because I am very worried about the quality of the students, for example. There is hardly a day that we do not discuss the issue of how to bring quality into these institutions and the problem is, of course, faculty. We have very few people, they are overstretched, they go from one university to another to teach and it is just not working out. So our major programme was to develop our faculty. For this reason, we sent 1000 students to Germany, France, Austria and the Netherlands. (We did not send them to the UK because the fee structure is too high. In these countries there is no fee structure.) I wanted to send 500 students to China for the reasons that, firstly, China is our neighbour, and also because I wanted to build knowledge networks and I thought we would benefit greatly from that. However, we want to see how these first 50 students do in China because of the language problem. If they return and bring a good experience with them, we will probably send more. We also have Fulbright scholarships and this is the world's largest programme involving 1000 students being trained over five years. We have put in half the money and Fulbright has put in half.

We have an in-service training for the teachers where we invite foreign professors and our top teachers to come and teach other teachers about modern teaching methodology. We also have a full doctoral programme. What happened was that I was not only the policy-maker, but also had to implement things because we could not wait for our programmes to implemented by others, so if it did not happen, I would just go and do it myself. As a result, there is an indigenous PhD programme. There were only 50 to 60 PhDs being produced in Pakistan and these were mostly in social sciences, with very few in sciences. We decided to have a big programme as the only way to increase our research output and develop our institutions at the same time, and also to make research relevant to our needs. So I implemented this and short-listed all the people in Pakistan who had published more than five papers from their local laboratories. Then I gave them three students each, matched it with the funding, and now we have 12,000 students enrolled in MPhil and PhD degrees in Pakistan (7000 for PhDs and the rest for MPhils). You will be happy to know that amongst those who are doing PhDs, 70% are women. We have a very large women bio-technology group. In one year, we have awarded over 2000 scholarships and we also award scholarships for indigenous PhD programmes.

We have also a foreign faculty hiring programme whereby we offer salaries ranging from $4000 upwards. We have managed to attract 265 foreign faculty staff. Amongst these, most of them are expatriate Pakistanis but there are some Russians, some people from Turkey, Azerbaijan, Iran and people of other nationalities. We are very happy to have them there. We would like at least 50% of the foreign faculty to be other nationals. There has been a 40% increase in enrolments since the year 2001. We launched another virtual university and we have had a 19% increase in distance learning programmes. We asked all the universities to make a five to seven year development regime. We sat and listened to all of them and we regularly reviewed their programmes.

The area that we are moving into now is the technology park / business incubator, because we now fear that government funding may not be sustained if we do not show results. Particularly in the area of biotechnology, a large number of products have been developed by the Pakistani institutions. As I said, biotechnology was one of the priority areas, so we funded a large number of projects including biotechnology projects at 27 university departments. Five large research institutions have also built up very good laboratories.

I spent a weekend with all our biotech scientists gathered together at what is called the 'Bioforum' in Lahore and I was very pleased with the outcome. They had developed a large number of different types of vaccines (these were basically animal vaccines - there were only a few human vaccines, all of which were already known, so no new ones). I do not remember all the names but there were also many other biotech projects and it was very pleasing for me to see the results.
Now they need to be commercialised and we are aware that without these parks and business incubators, this will not happen. Traditionally, as in all developing countries, there has been hardly any linkage between research and industry and the reason, as you probably all know, is that there is no confidence in public research, partly because public research is not strong enough and also because industry is operating at a very low level of technology so they do not see the benefit. Now, when they know that they will have to compete in the world market for all their products and processes, they are realising the value of research. They also need standards and in my meetings with industrialists they all asked for better skilled people and they all asked for standards.

We have a programme with the US and Pakistan has signed an agreement with the US on scientific collaboration. It started with $5 million but I think efforts are going on to increase that money to $130 million per year. I am also the coordinator of this programme. I will be going to the US next month to talk to all the institutions, but the emphasis would be on strengthening our standard institutions.

In terms of the promotion of scientific research, as I said, our research efforts and publications had been totally non-existent, hardly any research had been going on in our universities and as a result, the quality of teaching was down, so we made extra efforts to promote research. We funded 20 centralised research laboratories in major universities. We gave them expensive equipment that other universities could access and, because we could not possibly fund all 108 universities, they were told that they should provide this service to other universities so that they were centralised facilities. Then the digital library gave access to over 20,000 leading e-journals and 80% of the worlds peer reviewed content. Over 240 research projects have been funded in the last three years and 300 were funded between 2001 and 2003. All those projects were peer reviewed and I, myself, sat in on the selection of all of those projects. Some of them have resulted in new technologies. One is fuel cell which is made by one of our institutions who demonstrated it to us. Every time a new technology is made, they call me and any time a new indigenous car is made, they call me and show it to me. It is a matter of great satisfaction and pride for us.

The first thing that I wanted to do before the government introduced the new appointment was to increase the salary of the scientist. Now how would I do it without the government's permission? There would have to be a new salary structure for the scientists and that process is long, requiring a new ordinance and everything. The Minister and I were so worried about the brain drain happening, particularly after Canada relaxed its visa policy and a lot of our people were going to Canada, and we were very worried that we would be left with nothing. I went to the President and asked for permission to give research productivity allowances to the scientists. This meant that those scientists who had published eight papers in a year got an additional $1500 to their salary per month and the ones who had published six papers got an additional $1000, and so on. This particular initiative resulted in a 60% increase in research papers! I had to do that in order to keep them in the country. This was the only way.

We are now collaborating with universities. We are aware that we have to build and partnerships in Pakistan, partnerships between universities, research organisations and industry. We are encouraging that and we are going to be making a new presentation to the President and asking for incentives for the private sector.

Dr Atta-ur-Rahman is going to be here on the 4th and 5th December and he and I are meeting with several Vice-Chancellors of British universities to promote enhanced collaboration with the British universities. We are also, as I mentioned, collaborating with China and we are collaborating with 14 Chinese research institutes. We are also looking forward also to an increased collaboration with the US.

We are very worried about quality assurance, particularly for the private universities which are proliferating. We have asked the government for prescribed criteria that for each department there should be at least ten PhDs. If the department does not have ten PhDs, we should not have that department. We have put Quality Enhancement Cells in certain universities, but not all universities have them as yet.

Educational Accreditation Councils are in place and the examination systems of all universities are reviewed. The next issue is the quality of faculty and the appointment criteria. We are offering tenure track. We have shifted from government pay-scales to tenure appointments, which mean that people are hired at a higher salary and then they are peer reviewed. If they survive the peer review, they stay and if they do not, they are out. There has been some strong criticism of this and only 25 universities have accepted it, but it is slowly being accepted and in fact some younger people are working on the tenure track system and we are pleased about it. We wanted the younger people to come into the system because our faculty was ageing and most of our faculty was 60 or older.

The next issue is curriculum review. We have industrial collaborations and we are trying to promote international standards in education and by linking our universities with the British and American universities. We had our science curriculum reviewed but we are going to get it reviewed by an international faculty as well. (At the time, I also asked the Boston group to do it and for some reason they were not able to.)

In terms of university computerisation and networking, IT has really changed. I think that, probably, no technology in this century has been as useful to us - all of us - as IT, and it has really changed the landscape in Pakistan. I went to a place called Chithrall and there is a group of pagans who stay there. They do not have any religion. They are supposed to be the descendents of Alexander the Great. It is not easy to access that place, you have to go by horse or donkey, and I went there and found there was internet access there. So it is really changing and it is connecting us all. We have 60 universities connected on 155 Mbps international internet bandwidth. We already have some universities set up with video conferencing and we are asking the best universities like Karachi University to deliver lectures so that other universities can access them through the video conferencing. This is how fast we did it: in 2000, we had internet in only 29 cities; today we have more than 2000 cities on the internet. However, the internet still has only about 10% coverage in Pakistan, which is lower than we would like.

We also have the national digital library programme. Our partner is the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP) and I think this has greatly helped our people. There is hardly a day when I do not receive a request for access to the digital library, because at the moment only 50% of our universities have access. We are hoping that all of them will have that access, and I think it will make a great difference to our research output.

INASP has helped in the training of these 10,000 faculty members. INASP's representative, Martin, goes every now and then to Pakistan and he has been training our people. There were more than a million articles downloaded in 2005 and before I came one million had already been downloaded. We are now talking about providing e-books because our undergraduate education, due to the lack of faculty, is also suffering and we feel that e-books may help to upgrade our undergraduate education, so we are putting in a big programme for e-books as well. We are also partnering with the Library of Congress in America, as well as accessing books from them.

I have talked already about the approach of strengthening selected core areas, such as pharmaceutical and chemical. This is one area in which we had strengths already, but unfortunately we have hardly any chemical industry although traditionally, we have trained more chemists than scientists in any other field.

We are putting up nine new universities wherever we have strengths in terms of engineering or other fields. This was not my idea by the way, I wanted to strengthen the existing universities. This was our Minister's idea. While I was in Nigeria, he went and had it approved. I probably would have insisted on only opening a few new ones, not nine, and focused on strengthening the existing ones. But anyway, they are being approved and they are being set up with the help of Sweden, Germany, France, Austria, the Netherlands, Korea and the UK. I have been involved with Korea. I went to Korea and spoke the Minister for Science and Technology who has been involved since the very beginning in building Korean science and he has really changed the landscape of Korea.

Then there are our Ministries' programmes. The Higher Education Commission has been concentrating on the higher education sector. The Ministry of Science and Technology (I work with them as an advisor as well) is working on partnership promotion, strengthening the structure, building common facility centres for the industrial clusters and helping the industries work together. We have set up a National Accreditation Council which was established about five years ago and a national quality policy was also approved by the government.

These are some of the things we are going to be talking to the government about, all of which need to be done now. There has to be consistency of policy and we need legal and regulatory frameworks. The Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) regime is still weak, but the Prime Minister has made a new IPR authority directly under him and it has been given a lot of money to implement IPR. We have all new ordinances for IPR, we have revised our old laws and they have all been approved by the President. Measurements, standards, stability, law and order, these are the new things that we are talking to the government about, as well as encouraging SMEs and seed capital or start-up funds for new technology. Venture capital is one issue that we have been fighting for since 2001 and it still has not been done, though I was told just before I came that the prime minister had approved some funds from the public sector for venture capital. Lastly, there are innovation and pilot schemes, and so on.

Thank you.