Pakistan doesn’t simply have a dropout crisis. It has an exclusion crisis.

Pakistan has 25.37 million children aged 5–16 out of school.

That is 35.6% of the country’s school-age population.

But the problem looks very different depending on where a child lives.

There is an important distinction between an out-of-school child and a dropout.

Pakistan’s 2023 Population and Housing Census counted 71.27 million children aged 5–16. Of these, 45.90 million were attending school and 25.37 million were out of school. 

But among those 25.37 million excluded children, 20.03 million had never attended school at all.

That’s approximately 79% of all out-of-school children.

Only around 5.34 million had previously attended school and subsequently dropped out.

This distinction matters enormously.

You cannot bring a child “back” to school if that child never entered one.

Census 2023 and subsequent tehsil-level analysis show that even Pakistan’s largest urban centres contain substantial pockets of educational exclusion.

The figures also come with an important warning.

Pakistan’s administrative districts and tehsils do not always correspond neatly with what we casually call a “city”. So rather than manufacture a simplistic city league table, it is more useful to examine what the data tells us about exclusion within these major urban areas.

Islamabad: even the capital hasn’t achieved universal schooling

Islamabad performs considerably better than the provinces overall.

According to Census 2023, 15.06% of children aged 5–16 in Islamabad Capital Territory are out of school.

That represents approximately 89,000 children.

Think about that.

In the federal capital with comparatively strong infrastructure, greater institutional capacity and extensive public and private education provision roughly one in seven school-age children is still outside school.

Islamabad demonstrates that better urban infrastructure alone does not eliminate educational exclusion.

Lahore

Lahore illustrates another problem.

Census-based analysis identifies Lahore among the districts containing some of Pakistan’s largest concentrations of out-of-school children.

Peshawar

The Census-based Missing Third of Pakistan analysis identifies Peshawar among the country’s major concentrations of out-of-school children.

It estimates more than half a million OOSC across Peshawar’s tehsils.

That should immediately change the policy conversation.

An annual enrolment campaign cannot by itself address exclusion on this scale.

Children who have never entered school require one kind of intervention.

Children who dropped out require another.

Older children already working may require flexible or accelerated learning.

Girls facing mobility or access barriers may require entirely different solutions.

One city. Different children. Different barriers. Different policies.

Quetta

Census 2023 shows that Balochistan has Pakistan’s lowest provincial school-enrolment rate.

The Census-based tehsil analysis also identifies Quetta among the provincial capitals containing large concentrations of out-of-school children.

This isn’t simply a matter of running another enrolment campaign.

It requires identifying the specific barriers preventing children particularly girls from ever entering school and developing alternative pathways for children for whom conventional schooling is no longer realistic.

Quetta cannot be treated as an average urban education problem.

Karachi

Karachi exposes the weakness of city averages better than anywhere else.

There isn’t really one Karachi education crisis.

There are several.

Census-based analysis shows substantial differences between Karachi’s districts and tehsils.

Some parts of the metropolis perform considerably better than others, while peripheral and disadvantaged areas contain much higher concentrations of excluded children.

Pakistan now has better data. Use it.

For years, education policy has been dominated by national and provincial averages.

But averages are convenient for presentations and often terrible for policy.

A provincial OOSC rate does not tell us which neighbourhood needs another school.

A city average doesn’t tell us where girls cannot safely travel to school.

A national dropout number doesn’t tell us which children never enrolled in the first place.

Pakistan increasingly has the ability to move below these averages.

The 2023 Census gives us a much richer geographic picture of educational exclusion. Subsequent analysis takes this down to tehsil level.

The next logical step is even more granular.

District to tehsil to UC to child.

Imagine if every major city maintained a live map showing where its out-of-school children actually lived.

Not estimates buried inside reports.

Children.

Stop designing one solution for 25 million children

Perhaps this is the biggest policy mistake.

We speak about Pakistan’s 25 million out-of-school children as though they constitute one population.

They don’t.

A six-year-old girl in Quetta who has never entered school does not have the same problem as a fourteen-year-old boy in Karachi who dropped out to work.

A child in an Islamabad informal settlement does not necessarily require the same intervention as a child in Peshawar.

And a five-year-old who has not yet enrolled needs a very different policy response from a fifteen-year-old who left school five years ago.

Change the question

Pakistan has declared education emergencies before.

Perhaps we now need a different kind of response.

lets ask now

Who are they?

Where are they?

Have they ever attended school?

Why aren’t they there now?

And what intervention will get this particular child into education?

Because the most disturbing statistic in Pakistan’s education crisis may not be 25.37 million.

It may be that nearly four out of every five of those children never entered school in the first place.

Pakistan doesn’t simply have a dropout crisis. 

It has an exclusion crisis.