Pakistan's Education Sector Plans: A Comparative Analysis of Gender, Inclusion and Resilience

This report compares the education sector plans of Pakistan’s four provinces, assessing how well each provides for gender-responsive, inclusive, and resilient education. It finds shared ambitions but persistent gaps: an absence of gender-disaggregated data and gender-responsive budgets (except in KP), stipend programmes with weak monitoring, resilience reduced to curriculum mentions rather than genuine emergency preparedness, and inclusion narrowly defined around disability while overlooking gender, religion, language, and ethnicity. It offers concrete recommendations for turning provincial aspirations into measurable, time-bound commitments.

Key highlights/findings

All four provinces talk about gender, inclusion, and resilience. None back it up with the budgets or data to deliver.

Only KP has a partly gender-responsive budget. The rest can’t show how gender shapes their spending at all.

Inclusion is defined too narrowly. The plans focus on disability and ignore gender, religion, language, and ethnicity.

Resilience stops at climate. Pandemics, conflict, and other emergencies barely feature in the plans.