Mahbub ul Haq Research Centre at LUMS

Approximately 26 million children remain out-of-school in Pakistan. For those actually attending school, the quality of learning often falls short; many struggle to read grade-level texts even in their own language or to develop basic numeracy skills expected for their age. In 2022, 77% of children in Pakistan were in ‘learning poverty’ - to read and comprehend a simple, age-appropriate text by age 10.

Pakistan remains amongst the world’s bottom-ranked countries year after year in the Global Gender Gap Index. A plot of the sub-components of the Index for...

In 1992, Larry Summers in his lecture at the Annual Pakistan Society of Development Economics titled, “Investing in all the people”, presented a compelling argument in favor of girls’ education for development. The main academic debates...

Any continuous area or expanse which is available for consumption is typically referred to as ‘space’. In the Urdu language, this can translate to ‘khalaa’ understood as the ‘absence’ of forms, but at the same time generative of other or newer forms, much like silence in a musical composition...

There remains an overwhelming need to reduce the gender gap in labor force participation rates in Pakistan. As of 2021, women’s participation rates remain at around 22 pc with the country recording the slowest progress in closing the gender gap in the Economic Participation...

As educational institutions across Pakistan slowly reopen for a new academic year, an underlying anxiety is taking root: by how much has the learning of Pakistani students been set back? If lessons from recent scholarship are anything to go by, our youngest children...

Today, we see bright, knowledgeable folks of all ages, male and female, who know and understand education far better than those with decision-making powers. Almost all come from a segment of society that has benefitted from...

The prevalence of child labour in Pakistan is very high: up to 22% of children between the ages of 5 and 14 years are engaged in the worst form of child labour, including bonded labour in agriculture and brick kilns...

Between 2010 and 2018, there appeared to be some very exciting and frenetic reform efforts unfolding across the school education sector in the Punjab. Moving the needle on school access and learning outcomes, it seemed, was as aspiration closest to the hearts...

In Pakistan, 26% of children in the 5-16 age cohort have never been to a school. This translates into 16 million children (out of a total of 20 million children who are out of school) as reported in The Missing Third...

What does the politics of energy tell us about the relationship of the Pakistani state with its citizens? With loadshedding in the news again, it is worth looking at the preceding two decades to assess whether any substantive change in this relationship has taken place...

There is little research in the Pakistani context on the impact of teacher background on student learning outcomes in government schools. The diversity of teachers across the country...

Despite primary education being established as one of the 8-millennium development goals at the turn of the century, challenges still persist on the question of access...

Balochistan covers about 44% of Pakistan’s territory and houses about 6% of its population. Huge distances and low population density provide a unique...

For most countries, certainly Pakistan, the state remains the largest and most significant provider of services. Implementation of service