iteracy and education statistics in Pakistan continue to baffle every stakeholder. The potential one encounters in our interaction with children and adolescents in the country and the learning outcomes including basic literacy stand poles apart from the data that is collected at the household or school/ institutional level. The administrative data is getting bigger, better and stronger in Pakistan providing evidence of accumulated years of deficit in human resource development including indicators of literacy, enrolment disaggregated by gender, geography and wealth. Four reports have recently rocked the education and literacy landscape—the District Education Performance Index by the Planning Commission (2024); the latest digital census data released by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics 2024; PAMs The Missing Third report; and the ITA ASER 2023 on foundational learning. The numbers morph into an impossible challenge, district/ tehsil wise across the country as illustrated in the PAMS report.

n 51 percent of 5- to 9-year-olds are out of school children.

n 79 percent out-of-school-children have never been to school as opposed to 21 percent who dropped out.

n In Pakistan, the literacy rate stands at 61 percent, with female literacy at 53 percent.

n Urban tehsils have a literacy rate of 74 percent (males) with female literacy at 70 percent; the gender gap is narrower in urban areas.

Provincial Capitals: OOSC girls and boys and female literacy trends

Juxtapose this stark reality with the wonders of this country, the majestic landscapes and treasures. Exactly one week ago, I stood in front of the Karoonjhar Hills in Nagarparkar, Tharparkar, in Sindh—19 kilometres of rock with 3.5 -5 billion years of history. The Karoonjhars in a desert are a testimony to resilience, nature’s first principle, where thinking, adaptation and change are at the core of the ecosystem of human evolution and our brains: head, heart and gut. We can find many Karoonjhar Hills in our country with complete endogenous knowledge systems – but do we use the knowledge that will make literacy so much more relevant and richer within localised contexts?

Sadly, in the same district the OOSC data reveals the following trends:

The people of Tharparkar speak Dhatki but the medium of instruction is Sindhi. There has been little effort to mainstream foundational learning in the mother tongue. Two exceptions stand out. One, by The Citizens Foundation that decided to experiment with Dhatki as a medium of instruction. This was done after rigorous background research with compelling logic by Zubeida Mustafa, who has sworn a crusade against the “tyranny of language” that keeps our children away from strong foundational learning. The second initiative is by ITA, which with Global South partners from the People’s Action for Learning network in 17 countries worked on reclaiming mother tongue content through Every Language Teaches You initiative. Dhatki (Tharparkar), Khowar (Chitral), Seraiki (South Punjab) and Wakhi (Hunza) were the focus of reclaiming content likely to be forgotten, such as metaphors, poetry, stories, folktales and games. Much more needs to be done for the development of endogenous content in the child’s language of communication if we want to improve literacy rates

On this International Literacy Day, let us visit a real family who migrated recently to an urban slum in a mega city. This is the story of Rashida’s family. Her six family members survive on 1.5 meals daily. Rashida’s four children (in the 5-13 age bracket), including one with physical disability, are now dropouts suffering major learning losses. They moved to the urban slum in 2023 from their village in Dadu district after the 2022 floods. The children were enrolled in the village school close to their home. The migration had multiple adverse impacts as did the pandemic. The family income was impacted by Covid-19 and then by climate change rains/ floods. In despair and frail hope, Rashida and her husband moved to an urban slum in Karachi. Little did they realise that they had to face further climate change disasters with urban flooding and extreme heat. They suffer daily woes of non-existent sanitation, access to clean water, living in an illegal tin board hut with fear of ejectment, food insecurity, new languages, loneliness, infectious diseases, trauma and mental health challenges. The only silver lining is a shared android phone. Can it be their bail out for education and entertainment?

There is clearly a need to understand that today to reach to our most vulnerable people like Rashida and her family and the communities of Tharparkar, public policymakers and their partners must adopt the ideology of multi-sectoralism and local level planning if education, learning and literacy have to be repositioned in the country. This means the following:

Promote data-driven multi-sectoral systems: finance approaches to accelerate equity for all children, especially furthest behind (ECE to Grade12/ TEVT) addressing social protection, health/ nutrition, livelihoods and skilling.

Local level planning, budgeting and implementation systems: the science of scaling, support and tracking learner-centered safe inclusive spaces with technology integration.

Adopt holistic learning: combining academic and non-academic social and emotional learning-life skills content with assessment, building resilience, design thinking, valuing endogenous knowledge, innovations and positive mindsets.

Shift to the learning-teams approach: child-teacher-parent, all actors at school, youth champions, working with the middle tiers of AEOs/ TEOs and district teams who are well supported and strengthened (at school-local-district levels)

Create rich content in localised contexts: create localised content within the national curriculum and its student learning outcomes to ensure equity and inclusion of learners for bottom-up planning for sustained and growing literacies so that no child, adolescent or youth is deprived of actualising their potential and valuing their living heritage markers.

Big data drawn from households, schools and other facilities in the public and non-state sector continues to get better and more rigorous. The issue is how effectively will we use big data for action in each village, neighbourhood, union council, tehsil and district to design and implement programmes for OOSC/ adolescents. Pakistan must move forward towards a literacy mission that is truly personalised and multi-sectoral in the capabilities it generates for all its citizens without discrimination.

The writer is the CEO of Idara-i-Taleem-o-Aagahi. She is a founder of the Pakistan Learning Festival and a global champion of the Learning Generation Initiative