President for enhanced Pak-UK collaboration on higher education standards, research.

ISLAMABAD -- President Dr Arif Alvi Wednesday called for enhancing bilateral collaboration between Pakistan and the United Kingdom to improve the quality and standards of higher education in the country.

He emphasized that improvement in the education sector would open up new avenues in the fields of health, agriculture and artificial intelligence.

The president, addressing an event on Pak-UK Education Gateway, said the UK had always been supporting Pakistan, particularly in the fields of education and health.

The Gateway Program aims to enhance partnership between the higher education sectors of Pakistan and the UK in the areas of innovative and collaborative research, higher education leadership, quality assurance and standard setting, distance learning, international mobility and transnational education.

The program will support the ambitions set by the HEC in Vision 2025 which encompasses targets to increase gross higher education enrolment by 15 per cent, PhD faculty by 40 per cent, the number of universities to 300 and a total enrolment to 7.1 million.

President Alvi said since partition, the UK had been the first destination for Pakistanis to get education which also emerged as foundation of learning. Even currently, around 6,000 Pakistani students were studying there, he added.

The president also spoke high of the British Council's previous initiative of Alif Ailan to promote STEM education in Pakistan.

He appreciated the contributions of UK government towards the development of education sector of Pakistan.

Lauding the British Council's plan to spend around 10 million pounds in higher education under the Pak-UK Education Gateway initiative, he said it would open up new avenues of learning for the Pakistani youth.

He said owing to the resource constraints, Pakistan could not spend the required funds in the research sector and the UK cooperation would help fill the gap.

The president emphasized the need for enhancing the number of graduates to meet the national and global demand for skilled professionals, particularly in the field of Information Technology.

He said the market required millions of skilled people only for data analysis and strategy as in today's era, everything had been linked with the artificial intelligence.

President Alvi also reiterated that the financial empowerment of women was not possible without good education and health.

He told the gathering that the State Bank of Pakistan was about to launch a facility to...