Vote for Education (2017–18)

For the 2018 general elections, PCE ran its Vote for Education campaign to bring education onto party manifestos. It organised a series of consultation sessions with political parties, youth, girls, teachers, parents, and CSOs to surface education issues, and from these developed an education manifesto setting out a minimum agenda for education. That manifesto was disseminated to provincial and local candidates and to the leadership of all major parties, including the Pakistan Peoples Party, Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz), Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, Jamaat-e-Islami, Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (Fazl-ur-Rehman), Balochistan National Party, and the Awami National Party, urging them to make education a priority in their manifesto pledges. PCE also gathered region-specific recommendations from 18 districts across all four provinces, and sent district-level charters of demands to the provincial chief ministers and the provincial ministers of finance, education, and planning and development, while sharing the manifesto with CSOs, Gulmakai champions, and networks such as the Child Rights Movement for wider dissemination.

The campaign moved the needle. Girls' education emerged as a major pledge across the major parties' manifestos, with seven political parties, including the country's top three, committing to girls' education. Compared with their 2013 manifestos, all seven showed an increase in both the number and the scope of their commitments to girls' education. Education became a priority for the incoming government, which formed a national task force on education to enrol Pakistan's out-of-school children, half of them girls.