A PROMISE AT RISK

On September 8 every year, the world marks International Literacy Day. Progress is reported, usually with enough confidence to make the distance between promise and reality seem temporarily manageable. Nonetheless, there is another way of looking at the question of literacy in Pakistan: not solely through rates, targets and declarations, but through a more straightforward question: Who can actually access education? And, more particularly, who is prevented from accessing it even when the right exists on paper?

Take your mind back to those old PTV dramas. The feudal lord - the wadera, the jagirdar, the sardar - stood at his gate, arms folded, telling the teacher to go home. The message was unmistakable: education was not welcome here, especially if it threatened an established order.

That image never really left the screen. It found new actors.

Together, these interlinked problems form a disabling culture within institutional and business systems. They obstruct the promise of literacy long after a girl has learned to read and write. A society can enroll a girl, examine her and even graduate her, yet still prevent education from becoming a pathway to freedom, work, mobility or equal citizenship.

Pakistan adopted the Sustainable Development Goals in 2016 and committed itself to achieving universal, quality education by 2030. It has constitutional guarantees. It has policies. It has declared education emergencies. Yet, by every honest measure, the country is not on track.

The algebra of abandonment

Article 25-A of the Constitution has guaranteed free and compulsory education for all children aged five to sixteen since 2010. Pakistan has declared education emergencies, committed

to the SDGs and launched Unesco midterm reviews.

In 2025, the federal education budget was cut to PKR 58 billion. Education spending has fallen to 0.8 per cent of GDP, its lowest level on record, down from 2 per cent in 2018. The Unesco benchmark is four to six per cent. These figures are a ranking of priorities, written not in speeches but in line items. The pause between the podium speech and the policy ledger is where girls’ futures disappear.

The missing wall, the missing toilet, the missing bulb

In much of rural Pakistan, a school may exist on paper, in a budget line and in a government register. But a school without a boundary wall communicates something; a school without a toilet communicates something else; a school without a female teacher, safe transport, or basic facilities communicates that the system has not fully imagined the girl who is supposed to attend it. The wall, meanwhile, does not disappear when a girl leaves school. It moves with her. This is one of the most upsetting truths about the debate on girls’ education.

The higher wall

Women now fill 80 per cent of Pakistan’s medical college seats - a figure that inspires confidence until you follow a woman out of the examination hall and into a system that has no functional posting for her. For example, Pakistan Medical Commission data show that half of female graduates never enter or remain in sustained practice. The label ‘doctor bride’ that follows them makes the system’s failure sound like a woman’s choice. It is not. But the same wall remains, only higher up.

The impediment changes shape; it does not necessarily disappear. This is also why the argument for girls’ education cannot stop at counting how many girls enter a classroom. Retention matters. Quality matters. Safety matters. What happens after graduation matters. Whether education can be translated into economic participation and greater autonomy matters.

A vital question

Pakistan has declared an education emergency, committed itself to SDG 4 and constitutionally guaranteed the right to education under Article 25-A. Yet, an estimated 12 million girls remain out of school, while girls’ schools continue to face attacks.

What is the single most persistent barrier that existing policies and frameworks still fail to address? And what does that failure mean in the daily life of a girl whose school has no boundary wall, no female teacher, and no toilet?

I put these questions to a range of experts from across Pakistan. Some of their responses are reproduced below.

What the experts say

Prof Dr Mohammad Nizamuddin (S.I.), Chairperson of the Punjab Higher Education Commission, Government of Punjab, Lahore, referring to the World Bank’s Women’s Economic Empowerment report, says, “Structural constraints include restrictive social norms around mobility and marriage, which the World Bank’s Women’s Economic Empowerment report identifies as the dominant drivers of women exiting education and the workforce. Thirty-eight per cent of women in Punjab cited marriage as their reason for not pursuing further studies. Institutional gaps compound this: HEC data show that women comprise only 40 per cent of Master’s and PhD enrollees, with their representation dropping to 10–25 per cent in engineering and science fields.”

He then refers to the Labour Force Survey 2024–25, which shows that unemployment rises with educational attainment: female degree holders face an unemployment rate of 24.1 per cent, compared with 6.5 per cent among uneducated women. This reflects labour-market mismatch, occupational segregation, employer bias and household constraints on mobility rather than skill deficits. Excluding educated women from employment reduces GDP growth, wastes public investment in tertiary education and perpetuates the informal employment trap for the wider female workforce.

Baela Jamil, CEO of Idara-e-Taleem-o-Aagahi (ITA), Centre for Education and Consciousness, and an eminent educationist, reflects on the biggest barrier to girls’ education. “Pakistan is a country of paradoxes. On the one hand, we have a very high demand for education, while on the other, there are huge gaps in the provision of services. Concurrently, in many districts, girls’ access to education and learning achievement outstrip those of boys. The biggest barriers to girls’ education remain the absence of teachers, schools and opportunities to access technology at the middle and secondary levels, particularly close to home.”

“As I have witnessed during my travels across 120 districts of the country, households with three daughters eligible for post-primary education are often forced to make a painful choice. The high costs of transportation or arranging accommodation with relatives mean that, in many cases, only one daughter gets the opportunity to complete middle and secondary education. Why is this so? Our girls deserve to enjoy their constitutional entitlement to education under Article 25-A of the Constitution of Pakistan,” she adds.

Prof Dr Aliya Hashmi Khan, an economist, emphasises the need to make education the government’s top priority. “The literacy profile of Pakistan does not paint a promising picture for human development and the future economic growth trajectory of the fifth-most-populous country in the world. With an overall literacy rate of 63 per cent, a gender literacy gap of 19 per cent and more than 25 million out-of-school children aged 5 to 16, Pakistan is facing the rising costs of illiteracy: missed economic opportunities, untapped potential, increasing rural and urban poverty, rising unemployment and increased dependence on foreign debt. Can Pakistan even hope to keep pace with its peers if it does not address the grave challenges of illiteracy on a priority basis?”

Miss Anam Shahzadi, Vice Principal at The Learning School and College, Lahore, stresses the importance of providing a suitable learning environment for girls. “In my experience, keeping girls in school after the age of ten remains a significant challenge in many rural communities. Parents are more confident about continuing their daughters’ education when schools provide a safe, secure and supportive environment. Essential facilities such as boundary walls, clean girls’ toilets, access to free sanitary pads and menstrual hygiene education can greatly improve girls’ attendance and retention. If the government could take one immediate step, it should ensure that every rural school provides these basic facilities, enabling every girl to continue her education.”

“The single most persistent barrier is that policy is written for institutions, while the decision is made in a household. No boundary wall means her family weighs her safety every morning. No toilet means she leaves at puberty. No female teacher means nobody in that building shows her what she might become. Each is treated as a separate infrastructure line. Together, they are a message to the household and the household reads that message accurately. Policy has learned to fund the building. It has not learned to fund the expectation,” points out Shahnaz Kapadia, Founder and CEO of Mera Maan (Pvt.) Ltd., an enterprise development and training firm working on girls’ education and women’s and girls’ livelihood initiatives.

According to Dr Taskeen Mansoor, PhD in Anthropology and a gender and social inclusion consultant, the key barrier is not the absence of policies but inadequate gender-responsive implementation. “For many families, the lived reality is that schools without boundary walls, toilets, female teachers and safe transport are not perceived as safe spaces for girls. This reinforces conventional concerns about the opportunity cost and perceived economic value of girls’ education. These challenges are compounded by weak intersectoral coordination, with education often planned in isolation from transport, health and social protection. Meanwhile, the intersectional needs of girls with disabilities and those affected by climate-related disasters remain unaddressed,” she elucidates.

Admiral (R) Mohammad Asif Sandila NI (M), Chairman of the Moawin Foundation and former Chief of the Naval Staff, Pakistan Navy, explains what his organisation is doing to promote girls’ education. “Pakistan’s most persistent education challenge is not the absence of policy, but the gap between budget allocations and effective implementation on the ground. While constitutional guarantees and national commitments are important, resources too often fail to translate into safe, functional and quality learning environments.”

“At Moawin Foundation, we work alongside government institutions to bridge these gaps by improving school infrastructure, strengthening teacher capacity through modern learning tools and promoting life skills and values-based education. For a girl attending a school without a boundary wall, a female teacher, or a toilet, education can become a daily struggle marked by concerns about safety, dignity, privacy and health.

Today, our footprint extends across the country, with 340 public schools educating more than 46,500 students, alongside 8 vocational training institutes that provide livelihood skills and pathways to economic independence. Our special focus is on girls from underserved communities, encouraging their enrolment and equipping them with vocational skills so they can become confident contributors to their families, communities and the future of Pakistan,” he elaborates.

The script has not changed

What would it take to change this before the next International Literacy Day? The experts have shared their perceptions. But the real voices of the majority remain with the girl who dropped out at twelve, the woman blocked from pursuing higher studies and the female teacher commuting along an unsafe route to a school that should not be her burden alone to protect.

They are waiting - not for another declaration of emergency, but for a school with a wall, a toilet, a working light bulb, a decent budget and a culture that believes her education is not a threat to anyone.

Girls’ education cannot improve in isolation from how boys are raised and educated. A boy who is never taught to question the system he inherits may become the next gatekeeper: the employer who does not call back a qualified female applicant, the family member who ends a daughter’s schooling at Class 8 or even earlier, or the unwelcoming colleague. Teaching boys to share space, power and opportunity is not an optional addition to girls’ education. It is part of building the society into which educated girls must eventually step.

On the other hand, the scale of the problem is difficult to soften. More than 25 million children between the ages of five and sixteen remain out of school, while the female literacy rate trails the male literacy rate by 19 percentage points. Pakistan’s education spending remains far below the level needed to turn a constitutional promise into a lived reality. And in the World Economic Forum’s 2025 Global Gender Gap Index, Pakistan ranked 148th out of 148 countries.

These are not unconnected failures. They are different measurements of the same unfinished promise: a country that has formally recognised the right to education but has yet to make that right reliably accessible to every citizen. Today’s gatekeepers are harder to identify because they are scattered across systems, budgets, institutions and everyday decisions. But the effect can be remarkably similar.

The drama has ended. The series has not.

Dr Rakhshinda Perveen is a published author and a gender justice expert.She can be reached at [email protected]