Editing School voucher (section)

===Pakistan===
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In Pakistani Punjab, the Education Voucher Scheme (EVS) was introduced by Dr. Allah Bakhsh Malik, managing director and chief executive of the Punjab Education Foundation (PEF), especially in urban slums and the poorest of the poor in 2005. The initial study was sponsored by Open Society Institute New York USA. Professor Henry M. Levin extended pro-bono services for children of poor families from Punjab. To ensure educational justice and integration, the government must ensure that the poorest families have equal access to quality education. The voucher scheme was designed by the Teachers College, Columbia University, and the Open Society Institute. It aims to promote freedom of choice, efficiency, equity, and social cohesion.

A pilot project was started in 2006 in the urban slums of Sukhnehar, Lahore, where a survey showed that all households lived below the poverty line. Through the EVS, the foundation would deliver education vouchers to every household with children 5–16 years of age. The vouchers would be redeemable against tuition payments at participating private schools. In the pilot stage, 1,053 households were given an opportunity to send their children to a private school of their choice. The EVS makes its partner schools accountable to the parents rather than to the bureaucrats at the Ministry of Education. In the FAS program, every school principal has the choice to admit a student or not. However, in the EVS, a partner school cannot refuse a student if the student has a voucher, and the family has chosen that school. The partner schools are also accountable to the PEF: they are subject to periodic reviews of their student learning outcomes, additional private investments, and improvements in the working conditions of the teachers. The EVS provides an incentive to parents to send their children to school, and so it has become a source of competition among private schools seeking to join the program.

When it comes to the selection of schools, the following criteria are applied across the board: (i) The fee paid by the PEF to EVS partner schools is PKR 550 per child per month. Schools charging higher fees can also apply to the program, but they will not be paid more than PKR 1200, and they will not be entitled to charge the difference to students' families. (ii) Total school enrollment should be at least 50 children.  (iii) The school should have adequate infrastructure and a good learning environment. (iv) EVS partner schools should be located within a half-kilometer radius of the residences of voucher holders. However, if the parents prefer a particular school farther away, the PEF will not object, provided that the school fulfills the EVS selection criteria. (v) The PEF advertises to stimulate the interest of potential partner schools. It then gives students at short-listed schools preliminary tests in selected subjects and conducts physical inspections of these schools. PEF offices display a list of all the EVS partner schools so that parents may consult it and choose a school for their children.

By now more than 500,000 students are benefiting from EVS and the program is being scaled up by financing from the Government of Punjab.