OPINION: Need for creating 30m jobs over next decade

While the state grapples with border conflicts, terrorism threats, and polarised politics, Pakistan’s youth are fighting a quieter battle against despair, exclusion, and shrinking opportunity. This disconnect is dangerous when young people lose faith in the domestic economy, the outcomes are predictable: irregular migration, brain-drain, social unrest, and susceptibility to radical narratives. The risk, as the World Bank cautions, is not hypothetical.

What makes Pakistan’s challenge uniquely severe is the overlap of economic stress with political instability, security concerns, and recurring regional tensions.

As worked out by ‘World Bank research and analysis on unemployment around the globe’, Pakistan needs to create between 2.5 million and 3 million jobs every year and for the next decade — a staggering 25 to 30 million jobs — simply to keep pace with its demographic reality. This is not an aspirational target; it is a survival threshold.

World Bank President Ajay Banga’s recent warning to Pakistan that failure could fuel illegal migration or domestic instability should therefore be read less as an external alarm and more as a mirror held up to the state.

Unlike many policy challenges that can be deferred, employment generation in Pakistan is a binding constraint on growth. It is not a secondary outcome of macro-stability or reform sequencing; it is the central challenge. As Banga aptly put it, this is a generational test — one that will define whether Pakistan’s youth dividend becomes an asset or a destabilising force.

READ MORE: Pakistan must create 30 million jobs over next decade, World Bank president says

Pakistan’s labour force grows by roughly 2.2 to 2.5 million people annually. Yet, in recent years, net job creation has hovered well below this number. Estimates suggest that the economy has been generating between 1.2 and 1.5 million jobs annually in the best of recent years — and far fewer during periods of political turmoil, pandemic disruption, floods, and macroeconomic contraction.

This gap between entrants and opportunities has translated into rising youth unemployment, widespread underemployment, and a growing cohort of educated but economically disengaged young people. The official unemployment rate masks the true stress: millions are stuck in informal, low-productivity work, with little security and no upward mobility.

Creating 30 million jobs over ten years would require Pakistan to nearly double its historical employment absorption rate. This is extraordinarily challenging — but not unprecedented when viewed against regional comparators.

India, for instance, adds roughly 7 to 8 million jobs annually across manufacturing, services, construction, and digital platforms, supported by sustained growth above 6 percent. Bangladesh, with a far smaller population, has consistently created jobs through export-led manufacturing, particularly in textiles, absorbing millions of women into the formal workforce. Vietnam transformed its labour market by integrating into global value chains, attracting FDI, and focusing relentlessly on skills and industrial clusters.

Pakistan, by contrast, has struggled to scale any labour-intensive growth engine. Manufacturing’s share of GDP has stagnated. Exports remain narrow and low value-added. Agriculture still employs over a third of the workforce but contributes less than a quarter of GDP, reflecting low productivity and disguised unemployment.

Pakistan’s engagement with the IMF has been essential for macroeconomic stabilisation, while the World Bank’s 10-year “Country Partnership Framework” offers a longer-term development lens. Yet stabilisation alone does not create jobs. Fiscal consolidation, while necessary, often constrains public investment and slows growth in the short term.

The real question, therefore, is whether Pakistan can pivot from crisis management to job-centric growth — without waiting for “perfect conditions” that rarely arrive.

The channels to create jobs are multifaceted in a business enabling environment; whereas, business enabling environment is something that is not happening. Reviving export-oriented manufacturing must be one of the foremost objectives. Pakistan cannot absorb millions of young workers through services alone. Textiles, food processing, light engineering, pharmaceuticals, and construction materials all offer scalable employment potential — only if energy pricing, taxation, and regulatory uncertainty are addressed.

Second, the services sector needs formalisation, not just expansion. Logistics, retail, IT-enabled services, tourism, and healthcare can generate large numbers of decent jobs —only if skills training, digital payments, and SME financing are aligned.

Third, agriculture must become a source of productivity-linked employment, not hidden unemployment. Agri-value chains, storage, processing, and exports can absorb youth — only if land, water, and market reforms are pursued seriously.

Fourth, skills and human capital must be treated as economic infrastructure. Pakistan’s education system still prepares young people for jobs that no longer exist, while industries complain of skill shortages. This mismatch is a policy failure, not a youth failure.

Ultimately, job creation is not only about economics; it is about trust. Young Pakistanis need to believe that efforts will be rewarded, that talent can thrive at home, and that the system is not rigged against them. Whereas, hope is restored when policies are predictable, when merit matters, when businesses can invest without fear, and when the state communicates honestly about trade-offs.

A decade-long employment challenge cannot be met through slogans or stop-gap schemes; it requires consistency across political cycles. Pakistan’s youth bulge is still a window of opportunity — but windows do close. The choice before the state is stark: invest now in job-creating growth, or pay later through instability, migration, and lost generations.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2026