Our People
Dr Waheed Mughal - Director AESRA
I was brought up and schooled in a small village in Punjab, Pakistan. I received graduate degree from Government College Lahore, postgraduate degree in Economics from Forman Christian College Lahore (University of Punjab), MSc in International Money, Finance and Investment from Brunel University London and PhD in Social and Policy Studies from Loughborough University, UK. I experienced different educational systems in my academic life. My educational journey from a small village to a big city and then to the UK has given me an extensive personal experience of village and urban life as well as a wider international perspective.
In my PhD, I investigated the issue of out of school children in rural Pakistan. My thesis explores the dropout phenomenon from secondary education (classes 9 and 10) through the perspectives of teachers, head teachers, community members of school councils, fathers of dropouts and the dropouts themselves, in a rural district of Pakistan.
The thesis argues that the policy focus at national and international levels should be on dropout prevention strategies to achieve the education targets of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. Good intervention always requires local analysis of problems and assessments of potential strategies at the point of service delivery. This study, therefore, advocated a bottom-up policy approach to understand and address social phenomena, such as of dropouts, at the grass-roots level.