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When world leaders gathered at the United Nations in September 2015 to adopt the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, they committed themselves to an ambitious vision: ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education for all. Enshrined in Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG-4), this commitment recognised education as the foundation of sustainable development, economic progress and social mobility. For Pakistan, where millions of children remain out of school and learning outcomes continue to lag behind global standards, achieving SDG-4 is not merely an international obligation—it is a national imperative.
A decade into that agenda, with 2030 now just four years away, the question is no longer whether Pakistan signed up, it did, formally adopting the SDGs as National Development Goals in 2016.
What SDG-4 Actually demands is often summarised in a single phrase: "ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.” But the architecture beneath that headline is very demanding. The goal contains seven outcome targets and three means of implementation, collectively covering every rung of the educational ladder.
Target 4.1 demands that by 2030, all girls and boys complete free, equitable, quality primary and secondary education leading to relevant learning outcomes.
Target 4.2 requires universal access to quality early childhood development and pre-primary education.
Target 4.3 particularly relevant to universities calls for equal access for all women and men to affordable, quality technical, vocational, and tertiary education.
Target 4.4 asks that youth and adults gain the skills including technical and vocational needed for employment and decent work.
Target 4.5 demands the elimination of gender disparities at all levels of education.
Targets 4.6 and 4.7 address adult literacy and education for sustainable development respectively.
In Pakistan's constitutional framework, the foundation for these commitments already existed. Article 25-A of the Constitution, introduced in 2010, enshrines free and compulsory education for children aged five to sixteen as a fundamental right. SDG-4, then, did not ask Pakistan to invent a new obligation. It asked Pakistan to live up to the one it had already written into its own law.
What Pakistan's pledged was that alongside signing the 2030 agenda, the government internalised the SDGs within the strategic Pakistan Vision 2025 framework and established a Planning Commission to oversee progress. SDG-4 was placed in the top tier of national priority goals. Provincial governments in Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and Balochistan each developed education sector plans aligned at least on paper with the global targets.
At the higher education level, Target 4.3 was explicitly referenced in the National Education Policy of 2009 and reiterated in the 2017 policy revision, with the Higher Education Commission (HEC) designated as the primary driver of tertiary expansion and quality reform. A $400 million World Bank-supported Higher Education Development in Pakistan (HEDP) project was launched to assist the HEC in enhancing research capacity, improving quality, and building faculty through the National Academy of Higher Education. Numerically, the government's Vision 2025 document had set ambitious targets: primary school enrollment and completion rates of 100 percent, a national literacy rate of 90 percent, and gender parity across primary and secondary schooling. These were aspirational figures, perhaps, but they represented the political will or at least the political language behind SDG-4.
If we look at where Pakistan has performed so far, we see that Pakistan's education indicators have not stood completely still over the past decade. The national literacy rate, which stood at approximately 45 percent in 2000, has climbed to around 60 to 63 percent depending on the data source consulted. Secondary school enrollment has shown incremental gains, with enrolment rising from 4.49 million in FY2022 to an estimated 4.89 million by FY2024. Higher education gross enrollment has also expanded over the past two decades, with Pakistan now producing around 445,000 university graduates per year.
The institutional architecture for monitoring SDG-4 has also strengthened. Recently, a parliamentary committee, a National Parliamentary Task Force on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) under the leadership of Ms. Shaista Pervaiz MNA and Barrister Danyal, Parliamentary Secy, has launched a youth program for SDG implementation. In February 2025, the Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training, in collaboration with UNESCO Pakistan and the Pakistan Institute of Education, launched the SDG-4 Midterm Review (MTR) Report which is a comprehensive diagnostic of progress and gaps. The launch event acknowledged the scale of the challenge while committing to data-driven policy reforms and increased investment. Provinces have begun establishing dedicated SDG-4 units to coordinate localised efforts, with Sindh leading the way as a model for others.
Some provincial programs have delivered measurable results. Punjab's Education Sector Reform Programe, supported by donor financing, has expanded primary enrollment and public-private partnerships in school provision. Digital inclusion efforts have also gathered pace, with Pakistan reporting that roughly 70 percent of households now have internet access, a resource that, if leveraged wisely, holds transformative potential for distance learning and educational equity.
Nevertheless, the indicators where Pakistan remains critically off-track tell a sobering story. Most alarming is the out-of-school children crisis. In 2023, the number of children aged five to sixteen not in school rose to 26 million, cementing Pakistan's position as second only to Nigeria globally. Of those 26 million children, girls are disproportionately affected, with roughly 12 million girls out of school approximately two million more than boys.
Gender inequality runs through the entire system like a structural fault line. Nationally, only 53 percent of women are literate compared to 68 percent of men. Girls face not only lower enrollment but significantly higher dropout rates, particularly in adolescence. The World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report 2023 ranked Pakistan 138th in educational attainment out of 146 countries, placing it near the very bottom of global standings on this measure.
The geographic dimension is equally stark. Urban districts like Islamabad and Karachi report literacy rates above 79 percent, while rural districts such as Kohistan report rates as low as 26 percent and Dera Bugti reaches just 1 percent. This is not a tale of two cities, rather it is a tale of two entirely different countries inhabiting the same national boundary.
At the tertiary level, while universities have expanded in number, access remains heavily skewed. Only 9.39 percent of the population holds a bachelor's degree or higher. Women, students from rural backgrounds, and those from lower-income households face compounding barriers to higher education, precisely the populations that Target 4.3 and Target 4.5 of the SDG-4 were designed to reach.
The most alarming single statistic in this entire picture is Pakistan's education expenditure. In FY2024-25, public spending on education declined to a mere 0.8 percent of GDP, which is the the lowest in the world and dramatically below the UNESCO-recommended range of 4 to 6 percent.
For Pakistan to meet its SDG-4 commitments in the next four years, it would need to bring 26 million children into school, close a gender literacy gap spanning tens of millions of adults, expand early childhood education, raise tertiary enrollment rates to levels that currently require decades of sustained investment, and do all of this while multiplying education expenditure by a factor of five or six. None of these things are impossible.
Unfortunately, with only 39 billion rupees allocated for higher education in the 2026 budget, Pakistan is not merely falling short of its SDG 4 commitments, it is also moving away from them. There is still time to choose differently and smartly, otherwise it will not wait forever.
— The writer is Political Economist, Professor and former Chairperson, International Relations and Political Science, International Islamic University Islamabad. She is the recipient of prestigious Martin Luther King Award, United States.
