Shehbaz Sharif declared an ‘education emergency’ across Pakistan on Wednesday, the 8th of May 2024. This is in recognition of the fact that with over 26.2 million children, aged 5 to 16 years, Pakistan has one of the highest populations of out-of-school children in the world, according to the UNICEF.

He said that he will be convening a meeting shortly with the Chief Ministers of the four provinces on the state of basic education in the country. The allocation of the function of providing education is within the domain of the Provincial Governments, as per the Constitutional allocation of functions. Ideally, he ought to have convened a meeting of the Council of Common Interests (CCI) on the Education Emergency and the steps to be taken thereof.

The objective of this article is to highlight the trends in the number and composition of out-of-school children in Pakistan. The information has been extracted from the Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement Survey carried out periodically by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics. The last such survey was undertaken in 2019-20 and the findings released in June 2021. Information was tabulated down to the district level based on the sample size of almost, 5300 blocks covering over 80,000 households in the country.

The first table highlights the trend in the percentage of........

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