Pakistan is a country of contradictions. It possesses nuclear weapons but cannot guarantee a child a functioning classroom. It speaks of becoming a top economy by 2047 while cutting its education budget to levels that shame the region. It produces policy documents of impressive sophistication while millions of its citizens live and die without ever encountering a doctor, a trained midwife or a fully stocked health facility.
At the heart of this contradiction lies a number so small it should embarrass every policymaker who has ever drawn a salary from the public treasury — less than one percent.
According to the Pakistan Economic Survey 2025-26, public education expenditure stood at Rs962 billion in FY2025, down from Rs1,251 billion in the previous reported year — representing just 0.8 percent of GDP.
Public health expenditure stands at the same level. Combined, Pakistan’s total public investment in the health and education of its 252 million people amounts to barely 1.6 percent of its national income.
Not because the need does not exist. Not because the suffering is invisible. But because somewhere in the hierarchy of national priorities, the sick child, the illiterate girl and the dying patient still do not rank high enough.
The education numbers are especially alarming. Pakistan was spending between 1.5 and 1.9 percent of GDP on education only a few years ago. It is now spending 0.8 percent — a collapse, not a correction.
The UN-backed Incheon Declaration recommends that governments allocate between four and six percent of GDP to education. Pakistan is spending a fraction of even the lower threshold while simultaneously speaking the language of development, competitiveness and a demographic dividend. These two realities cannot coexist indefinitely.
One of them will eventually win. The evidence suggests it will not be the rhetoric.
There is progress — and it deserves honest acknowledgement. Pakistan’s literacy rate has risen to 63 percent, with male literacy at 73 percent and female literacy at 54 percent. Out-of-school children have declined from 38 percent in 2023 to 28 percent in 2025.
Balochistan has made notable gains, with its out-of-school rate falling from 69 percent to 45 percent. But 28 percent of children still out of school in a country of 252 million means millions of futures remain compromised before they begin.
Progress measured against decades of underinvestment should not become a sedative. It should be a warning — we are moving, but nowhere near fast enough for the scale of this crisis.
Health tells an equally disturbing story. Life expectancy has improved to 67.8 years, infant mortality has fallen from 60 to 47 per 1,000 live births, and immunisation coverage has increased. Yet Pakistan still trails South Asian benchmarks on several critical indicators. Around one-third of children under five continue to suffer from stunting — chronic malnutrition that permanently impairs physical growth and cognitive development.
A stunted child is not merely a health statistic. It is a lost opportunity, a weakened future workforce and a moral failure written into the body of a citizen before that citizen has had any chance to choose their own path.
The poverty numbers deepen the indictment. The national poverty headcount has climbed from 21.9 percent to 28.9 percent, reversing years of fragile progress and pushing millions back below the poverty line.
Urban poverty rose from 11 percent to 17.4 percent. This is the arithmetic of neglect — when a state does not invest in people’s health and education, it does not merely fail to lift them out of poverty. It drives them back in. The two failures are not separate. They are the same failure, compounding across generations.
Mental health, too, remains almost invisible in Pakistan’s public financing debate. Depression, anxiety, trauma and suicide affect families across every province, every class and every age group in Pakistan.
According to WHO Eastern Mediterranean Region data, mental disorders account for more than 4 percent of Pakistan’s total disease burden, with the burden higher among women.
An estimated 24 million people in the country need psychiatric assistance, yet resources for screening and treatment remain deeply inadequate.
The WHO has also reported that Pakistan has only 0.19 psychiatrists per 100,000 inhabitants — among the lowest ratios in the Eastern Mediterranean Region and globally. Its absence from serious budgetary attention shows how narrowly the state still defines human development.
Pakistan’s population has reached 252 million and is growing at 2.07 percent a year. More than half the population falls within the working-age bracket, while more than a quarter is aged 15 to 29. This could be a demographic dividend of historic proportions. But dividends are not automatic. They require schools that actually teach, clinics that are actually staffed, skills programmes that produce actual employment, and public systems genuinely designed to help young people become productive citizens.
Without that investment, a young population is not an asset. It is a pressure point — and pressure, when ignored long enough, does not dissipate. It detonates.
Budgets are never merely accounting documents. They are moral documents. They reveal what a state protects, what it neglects and what it is willing to sacrifice. Even under fiscal stress — and Pakistan’s fiscal stress is real, with debt servicing consuming more than half of federal revenue — choices are made.
Defence is protected. Administrative costs are maintained. Subsidies flow to those with influence. And health and education are quietly adjusted downward, year after year, in the comfortable knowledge that the people most affected by these cuts have the least power to resist them.
Pakistan does not merely need more money for its people. It needs a different hierarchy of priorities. It needs a governing class willing to believe that a child in a Balochistan village, a girl sitting in a crumbling government school, a mother in a rural Sindh hospital and a young man searching for dignified work are as central to national survival as roads, weapons, trade delegations and debt rollovers.
A nation that cannot afford its own children is not building a future. It is consuming one.
Every child who leaves school without learning to read, every patient who dies outside an understaffed hospital, every woman who never receives prenatal care, every young person pushed into unemployment without skills — these are not accidents of poverty or fate. They are policy outcomes, produced by deliberate decisions, repeated across decades, dressed in the language of fiscal constraint and institutional inevitability.
The Pakistan Economic Survey 2025-26 contains all the evidence anyone needs to understand what has gone wrong and what must change.
The tragedy is that it will be quoted for a few days, cited in a few seminars, filed away — and forgotten, just like every survey before it, while next year’s budget quietly cuts a little more from the people who can least afford to lose anything at all.
The question is no longer whether Pakistan can afford to invest in health and education.
The question is whether it can afford not to. And the answer — written in the stunted body of a child, in the illiteracy of a mother, in the silence where a mental health budget should be — is already before us. It has always been before us. We have simply chosen, year after year, not to read it.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2026
The writer is a freelance journalist and Communications Specialist at the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE), Islamabad. Views expressed are his own. He can be reached at [email protected]
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