Arshad Mahmood Awan
There is a particular kind of dishonesty that governments practise when they make promises they have no intention of keeping. Pakistan has been doing this with education for decades. The Constitution says every child between five and sixteen must receive free and compulsory schooling. The state has signed international commitments to universal learning. Politicians speak about human capital and the future at every available platform. Then the budget is announced, and the truth comes out. What a country actually believes in is not written in its Constitution. It is written in its spending.
The latest report on public financing in education, published by the Pakistan Institute of Education under the Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training, makes that truth impossible to ignore. It is called Public Financing in Education 2025–26, and its findings should disturb anyone who still believes Pakistan is managing its governance failures within tolerable limits. The evidence it presents suggests the opposite. The gap between what the Constitution promises and what the state actually delivers has become so wide that it can no longer be described as a shortfall. It is a structural betrayal.
Start with the headline numbers. Education spending as a share of GDP stood at 1.9 percent in 2019–20. By 2024–25, on provisional figures, it had fallen to 0.8 percent. The UNESCO benchmark for education spending is 4 to 6 percent of GDP. Pakistan is not approaching that benchmark. It is moving away from it. As a proportion of total government expenditure, education received only 5 percent in 2023–24, against an internationally recommended share of 15 to 20 percent. These figures represent the combined spending of the federal government and all provinces, since the 18th Amendment made education primarily a provincial responsibility. The system as a whole is spending a fraction of what genuine commitment would require.
The consequences of this sustained underinvestment are not theoretical. Pakistan currently has 25.37 million children who are out of school entirely. That is not a rounding error or a measurement artefact. It is a generation being written off before it begins. Learning poverty compounds the picture further. Seventy-seven percent of ten-year-olds in Pakistan cannot read and understand a simple piece of text. This is the product of decades of treating education as a line item rather than a national priority, and its effects have been deepened by the catastrophic 2022 floods that damaged school infrastructure across vast stretches of the country.
There is a piece of statistical sleight of hand in how education spending is typically reported, and the report is to its credit in exposing it. Between 2019–20 and 2023–24, national education expenditure rose by 72 percent in nominal terms, reaching approximately 1.54 trillion rupees. That sounds like progress. It is not. Once inflation is accounted for, education spending fell in real terms by 12 percent over the same period. The budget buys less today than it did five years ago, even though the number printed on it is larger. Real purchasing power is what builds classrooms, trains teachers, prints textbooks, and repairs crumbling walls. Headline rupee figures do not.
The provincial breakdown makes the picture worse. Punjab, which accounts for the largest share of national education expenditure, saw real spending fall by 21 percent. Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa recorded no real growth, meaning their education systems essentially stagnated in terms of actual capacity. Gilgit-Baltistan saw a real decline of 16 percent, Azad Jammu and Kashmir 15 percent, and the federal government posted the steepest fall of all at 29 percent. Balochistan was the single exception, recording a genuine real increase of 25 percent, which is notable precisely because it stands alone. The national trend is contraction, not expansion.
Beyond the aggregate figures, the structure of how money is spent reveals a system that is maintaining itself rather than improving. In 2023–24, 91 percent of all national education expenditure went to current spending, with only 9 percent directed toward development. Within that current budget, salaries consumed the overwhelming majority, leaving barely enough for the non-salary expenditure that actually keeps schools running on a daily basis. Nationally, non-salary current spending made up just 20 percent of recurrent education budgets. In Punjab the figure was 12 percent. In Azad Jammu and Kashmir it was 1 percent. Schools are being funded to pay their staff, not to function as places of learning.
Development budgets, which are supposed to fund construction, infrastructure improvement, and capital investment in the system’s future, fared no better. Utilisation across all provinces stayed below 90 percent. Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa were particularly poor performers, with the report identifying delayed cash releases and bureaucratic approval processes as the key culprits. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa managed to spend 110 percent of its education allocation, and Gilgit-Baltistan reached 122 percent, which at least signals genuine spending demand. Punjab, the largest province and the dominant weight in national education finance, utilised only 83 percent of what it had already allocated. Money was available and went unspent.
The report also raises a question the government has no good answer for: who exactly is receiving the money being spent? Pakistan still lacks sufficient disaggregated data on education expenditure broken down by gender, by locality, by disability, and by type of school. Without that information, it is simply not possible to verify whether girls, children in rural areas, or children with disabilities are receiving a proportionate share of resources. That opacity is itself a governance failure. A system that cannot say where its money goes cannot be held to account for whether it is delivering on its promises.
The recommendations the report offers are straightforward. Pakistan must move toward spending 4 to 6 percent of GDP on education, which is not an ambitious international target but a basic minimum. Budgeting must be made specific enough to track spending by gender, locality, and school level. Development funds must actually be released and spent. The approval systems that choke capital utilisation must be reformed.
None of this requires discovering a new policy framework. It requires political will, which is the one resource that has been in shortest supply. Pakistan has 25 million children outside the school system. The cost of continuing to treat that figure as a background statistic rather than a national emergency will not be paid this year or next. It will be paid across the next thirty years, in reduced productivity, deeper poverty, and a society less equipped to face every challenge that is already bearing down on it. Constitutional promises are not decorative. They carry a cost. The question is whether that cost will be paid honestly now, or extracted painfully later from children who had no say in the decision.
