Political will, tricky still

January 19, 2025

The state of political will for education in Pakistan

Political will, tricky still

In January 2013, a few days before the launch of the Alif Ailaan campaign, I spoke to a close friend about the challenges of trying to secure a more central perch for education within Pakistan’s public discourse. For the decade and a half prior to that period of my professional life, I had argued that the primary challenge in Pakistani public policy (and in public policy across the developing world or the Global South) was not resources or capability. I believed that both could be arranged, if a country was willing. The primary challenge was whether a country was in fact willing to change. This idea of whether a country is ‘willing’ has gotten trickier in the digital age. Traditionally, this political economy approach to development has helped explain why service delivery was broken or why public policy wasn’t working so well. The big question for the Alif Ailaan campaign was whether the political economy of something could be shaped or influenced in a way that would lead to transformation — or at least some measurable or tangible improvement. Over the next five years, I worked with an amazing team of young researchers and activists, as well as numerous leaders in media, politics, religion and business to try to frame the education crisis in a manner that was accessible and compelling, believing that such framing would organically generate reform. Could we successfully establish the urgency of education within the existing public discourse? When Alif Ailaan ended in 2018, we felt that the education crisis had become firmly ensconced into Pakistan’s public discourse.

Since then, the public discourse has occasionally sought to address of some of the issues. However, it has also been vulnerable to distractions. Poor learning outcomes in Pakistani schools or the growing fiction of low-quality, low-cost private schools as a magic bullet or the vulnerability of children to violence and abuse to, at and from schools would often be ignored. Instead, the media, public discourse and, especially, elite attention was often captivated by side shows. From superior courts’ inquest into the fees charged by elite private schools (which affects less than one percent of all school aged children), to the rumours of a crystal meth epidemic on school campuses (no such epidemic ever existed), to whether Pakistani kids should be more aligned with Raja Dahir or Mohammad Bin Qasim (if they can’t read or write or do basic math, who really cares?).

Since 2013, provincial, regional and federal governments have kept doing what they know how to do. Focus on inputs. Then, rinse and repeat. This meant that the public sector education system continued to manage school buildings and teachers. Occasionally, the system would try to do something out of the ordinary but mostly this was restricted to privatisation, outsourcing and public private partnerships — a rose by any other name: the public sector seeks to absolve itself from most responsibilities, the burden of educating Pakistani children is an easy one to wiggle out of because children don’t and can’t buy votes or TRPs.

The Pakistani republic’s preference to not be bothered with the complexity and enormity of the education challenge is a difficult pill to swallow for advocates of a political economy approach to reform. All the thinking about this crisis, and what needs to be done about it, has been outsourced, by default, to consultants and advisers (like the author of this article). Occasionally, a highly motivated and capable mobiliser of crowds (teachers’ unions, religious zealots, ethno-nationalists) will intervene to shape policy momentarily but mostly the sector is adrift. Occasional and accidental government bureaucrats, public-school administrators and teachers who yearn to think, act and initiate change stumble into their jobs with high hopes and leave with the marks of someone handcuffed and paralysed. Such are the wages of being chained to the limitations of a public financial management system that assumes everyone is a crook, a political culture that rewards drama and performance (rather than substance), and a national work ethic that prefers the mediocrity of the privileged elderly to the perilous vibrancy of the youth.

Political will, tricky still


Serious politicians can demonstrate political will to tackle the challenge head on by dismantling the embarrassing structures in place to respond to the education crisis.

Despite all this, there are shiny things in the muck. Net enrolment in government schools has increased significantly over the last decade. In 2022-2023, total public sector school enrolment was roughly 24.8 million. A decade earlier, it was 21.9 million. The rate of growth in enrolment was higher for girls than it was for boys during this decade. In 2012-2013, there were 9.7 million girls enrolled from pre-primary to the higher secondary level. This increased to 11.6 million by 2022-23. There are over a million more children enrolled in primary and middle school than there were a decade earlier and over six hundred thousand more enrolled in high school. If the public sector is so hopeless and in a state of such collapse, how did it manage these improvements in enrolment?

The largest chunk of credit for this goes to the least economically capable parents of children in Pakistan. Increasingly, they are the only ones that send their kids to government schools. Higher public sector enrolment figures should not be seen as a vote of confidence for government schools. Rather, they represent desperation. The hunger for better life outcomes is overwhelming across geography, ethnicity, language and politics. It is universal and unrelenting. The best evidence of its unrelenting nature is the ubiquitous mushrooming of the low-cost private school across every nook and cranny that can afford to sustain one. In all this desperation, there is opportunity for the enterprising politician but that endowment in Pakistan is decidedly thin.

Thinner still is real political will for improved education outcomes for Pakistanis. The political discourse is subject to the same whimsy that is everywhere else — crony capitalism, divisive showboating and algorithms that incentivise crazy. The digital age has altered the longitudinal nature of how will is expressed and it has totally transformed the latitude afforded to the speed of response. Politicians are tuned to saying the right things not just occasionally, but regularly. In the digital age, this is good enough, because each tweet or TikTok video is a narrative and each hour of every day is its own discourse. This is why the notion of an education emergency is simultaneously both profound and meaningless; profound because alluding to it suggests a recognition of a serious problem, meaningless because outside of the press release, or the WhatsApp forward, or the news channel ticker, or the podcast interview, there is the investment of neither head nor tail, neither heart nor soul, neither time nor money, in the pursuit of improved learning outcomes for Pakistani children.

Luckily, evidence proves that even at very low levels of pressure and performance, the public sector is capable of forging positive outcomes. Public policy cannot deliver sophisticated, Twenty First Century outcomes whilst using 19th Century rules and regulations. Serious politicians can demonstrate political will to tackle the challenge head on by dismantling the embarrassing structures in place to respond to the education crisis and replacing them with learning outcome-focused and future-oriented systems. The rest will keep tweeting, forwarding WhatsApp messages and celebrating the next news channel ticker.


The writer is a senior fellow at Tabadlab, a policy think tank in Islamabad

Political will, tricky still