Our literacy deficit

International Literacy Day comes around each year with little cause for celebration in Pakistan. Despite decades of promises and successive education policies, a large share of the country's population still lacks basic literacy, while millions of children remain outside school altogether. The occasion, marked on Sept 8, should consequently serve as an opportunity to examine why a country that has long recognised education as essential to its progress has made so little headway in providing it.

Pakistan's literacy rate has improved to 63%, according to the Pakistan Economic Survey 2025-26. Yet this still leaves more than a third of the population aged 10 and above without literacy skills. The gender disparity is particularly stark as literacy stands at 73% for men and just 54% for women. These numbers become more troubling when placed alongside the country's repeated commitments to universal education and development. Literacy affects a person's ability to find work, understand information, use public services and engage with the institutions that govern their lives. In an increasingly digital economy, the consequences of educational exclusion are becoming even harder to overcome. Those who enter adulthood without adequate literacy are likely to find themselves further removed from economic opportunity as the nature of work changes. Pakistan's educational aspirations have little meaning if ordinary citizens were to remain without the education necessary to exercise their rights and participate in national life.

What Pakistan needs is greater continuity in education policy. International Literacy Day should prompt a sober assessment of this unfinished task. A country cannot claim the full promise of its development while so many of its people remain excluded from the basic knowledge needed to navigate society.