New report exposes education crisis in Pakistan

A new report has highlighted Pakistan’s educational plight, showing that the country’s institutions imparting knowledge do not meet the required standards.

The District Education Performance Index (DEPIx) Report 2023 unveiled on Friday showed that the national average score for the overall index is 53.46 (out of a 100), which places Pakistan in the “Low” performance category.

The groundbreaking report developed by the Planning Commission, reveals striking disparities in education performance across Pakistan’s provinces and districts. 

This first-of-its-kind tool measures district-level education performance, focusing on key outcomes such as access, learning, equity, governance, and inputs such as infrastructure and public financing. 

Covering 134 districts, including Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT) and all districts in Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), Punjab, and Sindh, DEPIx classifies districts into four categories: Very High, High, Medium, and Low. The report primarily covers the period from 2020-23. 

Among the provinces, Punjab emerged as the top performer with a composite score of 61.39. KP follows with an average score of 54.47, while Sindh and Balochistan lag behind with scores of 51.55 and 45.50, respectively.

The DEPIx covers 134 districts across Pakistan, and the results reveal significant challenges in education delivery nationwide. Notably, none of the districts achieve the “Very High” performance category, indicating that even the best-performing districts fail to meet the optimal benchmarks for education performance.

Furthermore, none of the districts, except Islamabad, fall into the “High” category, making ICT an outlier and the highest performer across the country.

Alarmingly, more than half of the districts in Pakistan (77) are categorised as “Low” in education performance.

This group collectively accounts for about 25.6 million children (approximately 36% of the country’s school-age population). The majority of these low-performing districts are concentrated in Balochistan and Sindh, with 33 districts in Balochistan and 22 in Sindh, underscoring substantial inter-provincial disparities in education.

Particularly concerning is the fact that all districts of Balochistan fall into the “Low” category.

Nearly two-fifths (56) of Pakistan’s districts are classified in the “Medium” category, with scores ranging between 55 and 70. These districts are spread across Punjab, KP, and Sindh. Punjab leads with the highest number of districts in this category, totaling 32, followed by KP with 16 districts, and Sindh with 8.

With the exception of ICT, the 10 highest-scored districts in Pakistan are exclusively from Punjab and KP, with 7 of these from Punjab and 2 from KP. Notably, no districts from Sindh and Balochistan are represented among the highest-scored 10 districts.

The strong performance in the top-ranked 10 districts can largely be attributed to high scores in the Infrastructure & Access domain, averaging at 82.43, followed by the Inclusion (Equity & Technology) domain at an average of 78.29.

Conversely, even the country’s highest-scoring districts struggle in the Public Financing domain, with only 3 out of the 10 exceeding a score of 50 on this domain, and the overall average score for the top 10 districts at 47.48.

Public financing also shows the second-widest variation (18.10 points) among the highest performing districts, ranging from ICT’s 55.97 to Rawalpindi’s 37.87. These findings underscore the need for greater focus on increasing education financing and improving its efficiency. In the Learning domain, only Rawalpindi and ICT score above 60, and the average across all 10 districts is only 56.66.

The lowest-scoring 10 districts paint a stark contrast, with Balochistan disproportionately represented, accounting for 6 of these districts. Sindh and KP each contribute two districts to this group.

Infrastructure & Access, a strength for the top-ranked districts, emerges as the most significant weakness for the lowest-scored ones. With an average score of 36.39 in this domain, all these districts, with the exception of Chagai, perform worse on Infrastructure & Access than their overall index score.

Meanwhile, Governance & Management emerges as the domain with the highest average across the lowest-scored districts, coming out at 48.36 compared to the national average of 56.18 for this domain.