THE federal government has embarked upon the welcome initiative to enrol 25,000 out-of-school children in Islamabad within three months. With Pakistan home to roughly 26m out-of-school children, a serious effort to get them into classrooms is essential and long overdue. The campaign’s structure suggests that the authorities recognise the scale of the challenge. Door-to-door surveys, the mobilisation of university volunteers, collaboration with NGOs and the creation of community schools near identified hotspots are all practical steps that could help locate children who have slipped through the education system. The focus on neighbourhood-level “carpet coverage” is particularly encouraging. In a city where children can often be seen selling flowers at traffic signals, washing cars in markets, or working in homes, the barrier to schooling is rarely simply the absence of classrooms. Poverty, distance and the opportunity cost of education often keep families from sending their children to school. The government’s acknowledgement that education must sometimes be linked with skills and livelihood prospects is therefore realistic. Without addressing the economic pressures faced by families, enrolment drives may be short-lived.

Yet the initiative also raises the question of why such urgency is not reflected across the provinces. Islamabad’s target of enrolling 25,000 children is significant in the context of the capital, where about 89,000 children remain out of school. But this is only a fraction of the national crisis. The majority of Pakistan’s out-of-school children live in the provinces, where constitutional responsibility for education lies after devolution. If the federal government can establish clear targets and timelines for Islamabad, provincial authorities must be encouraged, rather required, to do the same. Without measurable goals in Punjab, Sindh, KP and Balochistan, national progress will remain uneven. The Islamabad campaign may prove a useful model. But unless similar commitments emerge across the country, the promise of education for every child will remain more aspiration than reality.

Published in Dawn, March 17th, 2026